Dafna Maimon Has a Gut Feeling

Dafna Maimon’s sprawling solo exhibition at Kiasma in Helsinki implores us to reconnect with our messy corporeal entanglements. Dismissing René Descartes’s dualist division between mind and body, Maimon asks: what about the symptoms that persist, that make themselves known and felt, despite (or precisely because of) our calculated attempts at control? With grotesque specificity and a healthy dose of humour, ‘Symptoms’ rejects the claim of mind over matter, bringing to life the pulsating, meaty core of that which makes us human – our embodied knowledge.

In the first room, a pastel-on-velvet painting, Initially a Portrait of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680) (2025), depicts a heavily abstracted version of the sovereign, her head composed of bulbous bowels and coiled gut formations. The fleshy tubes of peach and ochre are punctuated with ovular white pearls, to denote her noble status. Elisabeth famously corresponded with Descartes, repeatedly challenging his assessment that the mind was wholly separate from the body. Middle-aged femme figures appear throughout the exhibition, representing alter-egos for the artist and expressing her wider interest in embodied processes.

Passing through Indigestibles (2021), a large-scale, immersive installation of a throbbing, red-hued intestine, we’re expelled into a room in which an eponymous film is showing. In it, Shelly, the protagonist, watches a programme celebrating the life of a recently deceased orangutan named Lucy. Parallels between the two begin to form, as Shelly appears to be living out her own kind of self-imposed captivity, beholden to routines of over-consumption. Close-ups of her grease-stained lips as she gnaws the meat off a chicken bone deepen the comparison with the animal world. We are firmly in the physical realm, with our visceral reactions to Shelly’s behaviour ranging from heart-wrenching empathy to stomach-churning repulsion. The gut’s ubiquity in Maimon’s practice, and in this show in particular, is in no small part owing to its allegorical elasticity: the organ contains the most diverse microbiome in the human body, making it a powerful metaphor for heterogeneous community.

Nearby, the video Leaky Teeth (2021) plays inside a rocky cave. It follows another alter-ego, June, who is plagued by an agonizing cavity in her wisdom tooth. Relics from prehistoric times, we learn that wisdom teeth have lost their original function – as humans now largely eat softer, processed foods – but carry an evolutionary memory. Here, June – a type-A personality who would perhaps prefer to reside purely in the realm of Cartesian reason – is forced to listen to the message her impacted tooth insists on telling her, as she tries to go about her highly scheduled quotidian routine.

Maimon described her practice to me as a ‘choreography of daily life’ and this is perhaps best illustrated in her impressive new three-channel film, Homebody (2025). Viewers perch on soft, pimple-like seating to watch the film’s four main characters engage in a musical narration of their symptoms – from amorphous back pain to persistent dry mouth. One protagonist sing-asks: ‘how can there be / a part of my body / that I can’t reach / that doesn’t make sense,’ in response to a mid-back itch. While they engage in ordinary activities in their shared home, passing through each other’s parallel worlds or finding brief moments of synchronicity, they remain tethered to their psychosomatic rhythms.

The term psychosomatic – divorced from its commonly-held negative connotations – really gets to the heart of what Maimon is illustrating here: with Homebody, she exposes the potent entanglement of mind and body. ‘Symptoms’ lays bare the long-held fallacy of the self-contained individual and the supremacy of the mind in western thought, revealing rigorous materiality and diverse community as its only true antidotes.

Dafna Maimon’s ‘Symptoms’ is on view at Kiasma, Helsinki, until 21 September

_{Main image: Dafna Maimon, Leaky Teeth, 2021, installation view. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Finnish National Gallery, Kiasma Museum, Pirje Mykkänen}