Jen_DeNike and Barbara_von_ Portatius

My Silence Is Made of Explosions" is a house of mirrors where vision becomes both a weapon and a dream. Each photograph is never a neutral surface: it is fractured by mirrors, refracted through color, layered with symbols, staged as performance, and rewritten on the body itself. Eyes split open like stars, skin turns into script, shadows whisper their secret geographies. These images destabilize the gaze, refusing to be contained by singular perspectives or fixed identities. Instead, they summon the uncanny, the intimate, and the political at once—revealing selves that multiply, shimmer, and resist. In dialogue with the women of surrealism who first turned the camera into a site of psychic revolt, this exhibition extends their legacy into the present, showing how acts of seeing can open portals into other realities, other freedoms, other futures. As Claude Cahun once demanded, “Let me at last be granted the right to see with my own eyes.”This exhibition answers that demand, showing vision as rebellion, as metamorphosis, as freedom.

My Silence Is Made of Explosions brings together seven artists whose practices resonate with the radical legacy of the women of surrealism. From Zaneli Muholi’s charged self-portraits that confront systems of visibility and erasure, to Aida Muluneh’s allegorical compositions, Tanya Franco Klein’s cinematic self-images, and Elena Dorfman’s explorations of body and environment unravel the line between reality and dream. Patricia Vougaris manipulates layers of perception. Pixy Liao stages intimate gender inversions, and Jen DeNike conjures movement and myth through lens-based performance. Working collaboratively through a surrealist, score-based process, Jen DeNike and Barbara von Portatius produce collages that function as exquisite fragments—assembled through intuition, displacement, and a shared engagement with the unconscious. Like their surrealist predecessors Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Lee Miller and Nusch Éluard, these artists turn the act of seeing into an act of becoming—opening windows into identities, desires, and worlds that defy singular truths.

Curated by noted surrealist connoisseur/collector David Raymond. Co-curated by Bruce Halpryn, art collector and VISU Contemporary owner/curator.