Hyper–stimulants often perceive our bodies as excessively present, overly material, and almost grotesque in their immobility and hyper–reality – whereby, instead of the ‘authentic’ , the body emerges as a simulation and a construction. The entire process functions as a procedure of casting a supporting mold and its further manipulation. In his previous work, Joksimović used plastic materials, while now he employs sculptural material as the central element of his practice. The plaster mold functions here as a kind of bodily prosthesis, as an anti-normative object: the artist’s body is no longer represented as a stable entity, but rather as a construct of male fantasies. The body becomes artificial – multiplied, transformed into an object, fragmented, and rendered hyper-visible.
“Camp is the love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” written by Susan Sontag in her seminal essay Notes on Camp, defining camp not merely as an aesthetic category, but also as a method for destabilizing normative systems of representation. It is precisely from this space of artificiality, stylization, and excess that Luka Joksimović’s Willendorf: An Independent Body emerges, treating the body as a discursively and ideologically produced field in which mechanisms of power, sexuality, the gaze, and social regulation intersect.
Act 2
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Photo: Vukašin Rajković
Referencing the Venus of Willendorf as one of the earliest known representations of the human body, the work raises questions about the historical construction of corporeality and the ways in which representations of the body have, across different periods, functioned as carriers of collective projections, symbolic values, and social fantasies. What is traditionally interpreted as an archetypal figure of fertility is here transformed into a paradigmatic example of the body as a culturally produced object, destabilizing the assumption of the body as a universal or naturally given category. The body emerges as a space of continuous negotiation between representation, normativity, and the ideological production of identity.
Within the contemporary context of the hyper-production of visual content, digital reproduction, and a pornographic regime of visibility, the body becomes subject to processes of extreme hyperstimulation. It simultaneously functions as an object of the gaze and as a media-constructed surface of endless optimization, aesthetic modification, and the performative production of desire. Such a body exists between hyper-presence and ontological instability and incompleteness: too visible to remain autonomous, too material to sustain the illusion of authenticity. At this point, the body takes on the character of a simulacrum, an artificial construction existing between fetish, object, and media projection.
Within this regime of representation, the male body occupies a particularly contradictory position. Historically constructed as a paradigm of discipline,
rationality, strength, and social dominance, it functions as a central figure of the patriarchal imaginary. At the same time, the male body often becomes a site where expectations of patriarchal toughness, the roles of protector and soldier, and the embodiment of authority intersect with an obsessive need for sentimentality and emotional expression, which remains socially stigmatized when associated with male affect. Precisely because of its privileged position, the male body remains burdened by an imperative of stability and control, becoming a site of the continuous performative reproduction of power. Its presumed neutrality conceals the deeply ideological character of masculinity as a social construct. The male body thus becomes articulated as a political matrix through which relations of hierarchy, authority, and normative social order are produced.
When the body is displaced from the heteronormative regime of representation, particularly through queer identities and aesthetic practices, it enters a field of social ambivalence. Within contemporary visual economies, the queer body is situated between two extremes: invisibility and hyper–fetishization. Simultaneously marginalized and spectacularized, it appears as an excess of meaning or an object of desire, while its social position remains persistently elusive. Through the lens of camp aesthetics, the body becomes excessively stylized, theatrical, fragmented, and artificial, resisting the reproduction of the illusion of a coherent, unified identity.
Performace
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Photo: Iva Marković / ‘Ostavinska’ Gallery 2026.
In this sense, Judith Butler’s theoretical position becomes crucial to understanding the work. Butler’s conception of the body as a performative construct implies that identity does not precede social norms, but emerges through their continuous repetition and enactment. The body is produced through the regulatory mechanisms of culture, language, and social expectations. Joksimović’s work intervenes within this space of performativity, treating the body as an unstable material that remains open to continuous processes of transformation within gender and representation.
The process of casting a plaster mold becomes a central methodological and symbolic procedure. Plaster assumes the function of a bodily prosthesis, an extension of the body that simultaneously affirms and disrupts its integrity. Unlike the earlier works based on plastic materials and synthetic surfaces, the introduction of a material carrying weight, fragility, and an almost forensic presence of the body shifts the work into another register. The mold becomes the trace of an absent body, its negative, shell, or posthumous remainder. Through this process, the body is multiplied, fragmented, and transformed into an object that evades any clearly defined anatomical or gendered totality.
Within this transformation, a parallel can also be drawn with the figure of the siren as a mythological symbol of seduction, desire, and fatality. Traditionally constructed as a figure whose body, voice, and presence threaten the male subject and lead him toward destruction, the siren functions as a projection of male fears surrounding desire and the loss of control. Joksimović’s work introduces a significant reversal within this framework: the queer male body assumes the position of an ambivalent figure onto which mechanisms of desire, fetishization, and danger—historically reserved for the female figure—are projected. The male body is thereby displaced from its traditional position as observer and bearer of the gaze, entering the realm of the object of desire, fascination, and potential threat. Its hyper-visibility leads toward a loss of stable meaning, opening a space for the grotesque through aesthetic deformation, as well as for the political subversion of normative categories of gender, sexuality, and representation.