The exhibition is based on the premise that reality cannot be rigidly divided into interior and exterior, surface and depth, or the personal and the systemic. Rather, it is a porous field with constant seepage between individual planes. What is meant to remain hidden sooner or later manifests on the surface, not as a transparent message, but as something elusive that disrupts the stability of meaning. The title Bleed Through can be interpreted both as seepage and as bleeding, that is, an unpleasant passage through a phase in which the repressed inevitably becomes visible. The exhibition focuses precisely on this moment when accumulated stress, violence, and structural imbalances exceed the absorptive capacity of systems and bodies, entering the present as their immanent consequence.

In such a destabilised field, reality does not merely disintegrate into fragmentary images and affective atmospheres, but also into forms that allow us to grasp what seems to be ungraspable (yet). Fear here functions not merely as an affect, but as a mode of organising experience. Historically, it has been externalised into figures that allow it to be named and, at the same time, to be distanced. Monsters, ghosts, or horror figures thus function as projection screens. This is not fantasy in the narrow sense, but a cognitive and cultural mechanism that structures the boundaries between the acceptable and the unacceptable. In this sense, the monstrous does not denote the exceptional, but that which has been pushed outside symbolic processing and returns in a different form.

Anna Engelhardt’s video installation Towards Dissolution situates this dynamic within an Italian oil refinery where Russian oil is laundered into the European market. As Engelhardt wanders through the fumes and tanks of the Sicilian refinery, she reveals infrastructure as a space where violence accumulates and transforms. Refining aims to make the violent conditions of extraction invisible. The perspective of the body exposed to this environment shows that this process is never fully closed. The material remains unstable, penetrating protective layers, clinging to surfaces, and leaving traces that cannot be completely eradicated. In moments when the infrastructure can no longer seal itself off, seepage occurs, during which separated planes reconnect and emerge at the surface as contamination. The project was developed during Fondazione Studio Rizoma residency with support from Giulia Colletti.

Tina Bxtq addresses a similar process at the level of individual corporeality through a costume from the performance Postangelic and ceramic objects depicting cute yet disfigured hybrid organisms. Here, the body is not understood as a closed entity, but as a permeable membrane that both absorbs and excretes, stabilises and fails. The aesthetic of cuteness functions as an ambivalent surface that simultaneously conceals and accentuates abjection. The fragmentation, openness, and vulnerability of the forms disrupt the notion of the body as a whole and autonomous subject, revealing it as a site where individual experience and broader structural pressures intersect.

BIO: 

Anna Engelhardt
Anna Engelhardt (b. 1996) is an audiovisual artist and writer based in London. Her practice is concerned with giving filmic form to the spectral traces of information that persist from material violence. She works with environments that emerge from structures of extraction, occupation, and dispossession. Her works feature fictional characters trapped within these toxic landscapes, weaving together CGI reconstructions and archival footage into video installations.

Her work has been presented internationally at festivals and institutions including transmediale, HKW, Berlin; ICA, London; Kyiv Biennial; TEA Tenerife Biennial; National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; BFI London Film Festival; Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media, Oslo; Steirischer Herbst, Graz; V.O Curations, London; B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, Frankfurt; and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

Her essays, which form an integral part of her artistic research, have been published in e-flux, The Funambulist, NERO, and by Spector Books. Her practice has also been recognised through residencies and grants, including the transmediale Residency, Berlin (2022), Matadero Madrid Situated Residency (2023), FLAMIN Fellowship from Film London (2024), and the Film and Video Umbrella FVU New Takes Commission (2025).

Tina Bxtq
Tina Bxtq (b. 1998) studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (2018–2023) and spent a period of study at Konstfack in Stockholm. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

Her practice brings together drawing, ceramics, installation, and performance, exploring the mutability of identity and corporeality through posthumanist and queer perspectives. She understands the body as a membrane or costume that can disintegrate, regenerate, and transform.

Her works frequently carry an ephemeral, theatrical quality, creating environments set apart from everyday life. Central to her practice is the notion of the “abject”, that which is ambiguous or unsettling, blurring the boundaries between the familiar and the foreign, the attractive and the repulsive. Through performances and costumes, she develops personal mythologies that open out onto collective meanings.