Talents 10 .  Thirty-Two Kilos . Ivonne Thein / Heide Häusler

15 March to 11 May 2008

The fragile lightness of the models seems disturbing and disquieting in their artificial, unnatural poses. Balanced on all fours with their backs to the ground, facing upward, or lunging forward with torso twisted around to the side, some of these images look more like displays of painful contortion than presentations of bodies and fashion. Their limbs appear unnaturally long and thin—in some poses dangerously fragile—with bones and joints protruding conspicuously. The female models wear white satin underwear, corsets, silk stockings, as well as medical bandages that entwine themselves around arms and upper body in such a way that movement appears altogether impossible; that stretch across breast and neck in a way that must make it hard to breathe at all. But what are these emaciated bodies actually presenting?