A provocative new art exhibition titled "soft weapons: Keep Your Fucking Hands Off My Body" is currently showcasing works by 29 artists at 12 Franklin in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Curated by Cassandra Neyenesch and Lydia Nobles, the exhibition features controversial pieces including photographs of vaginal interiors taken with a sex toy camera, challenging viewers' perceptions of bodily autonomy and surveillance.
The exhibition's title draws inspiration from the concept of soft power - influence exercised through non-violent means - combined with photographer Gordon Parks' famous declaration that his camera was his "choice of weapon." The show argues that the human body serves as a site of freedom and a method to resist forces of suppression, surveillance, and systemic violence.
Several works in the exhibition create an immersive experience that makes visitors acutely aware of their own physical presence in the space. Aneesa Julmice's etching-on-paper work "The Trinity" (2025), mounted high on one of the gallery's support beams, is angled downward like a surveillance camera, compelling viewers to watch themselves move through the space. The piece is created on Hahnemühle German etching paper and displayed in plexiglass.
Interactive seating elements throughout the gallery offer varied textures, heights, and sensations, prompting different bodily responses from visitors. Lydia Nobles' ongoing sculpture series "As I Sit Waiting" (2019-ongoing) specifically highlights stories of people who have had abortions or were forced to carry pregnancies to term, incorporating bodily actions of leaning, sagging, and resisting.
Aliza Shvarts' installation "Dark Play" (2025) takes the form of plastic cones arranged in a large ring, each printed with numbered texts about bodily autonomy. The piece draws viewers into a spellcasting-like experience, silently voicing incantatory phrases while moving in predetermined patterns across time and space.
A distinctive feature of the exhibition is a line of duct tape on the floor that leads visitors out of the main gallery with storybook instructions to "follow the yellow brick road" to a media room. Inside, Ayanna Dozier's 16mm film "Nightwalker" (2022) follows a sex worker up a subway escalator, creating an unsettling atmosphere with its soft glow in the darkness that evokes wandering through a red-light district.
The main gallery also features Lena Chen's "Full Circle" (2022), which periodically plays the sound of a crying baby, awakening primal bodily instincts in visitors. This auditory element adds another layer to the exhibition's exploration of physical and emotional responses.
One of the most striking pieces is Christen Clifford's "Interior Portrait: Tunnel 28" (2021), a massive dye sublimation print measuring more than four by five feet that displays what appears to be the interior of a rectum. The image is displayed atop a soft chair whose fabric features the same pattern, emphasizing the artist's ongoing series titled "We Are All Pink Inside" (2018-ongoing).
Clifford's monumental work "INTERIOR 0502" (2018), measuring nearly seven feet across, presents pixelated patches of hot and cool pink shadowed with blooms of maroon and violet. Visitors can see themselves reflected in the plexiglass covering, appearing as small elements within the sublime landscape. The artist emphasizes that these images are completely unedited, with no digital or color manipulation, standing in stark contrast to the heavily filtered images commonly seen in digital media.
The pixellation in Clifford's work evokes an information overload, representing the body literally overpowering technology. Rather than being miniaturized to a consumable scale like tabloid covers or digital screens, these monumental works resist capitalist consumption through their sheer size and uncompromising presentation.
The exhibition's location adds symbolic significance to its message. The show occupies a temporary space that a developer friend of the curators allowed them to use before it gets rented out - notable since this is valuable waterfront property in New York City. Like a weed sprouting between cracks in pavement, the exhibition asserts a living, corporeal presence that refuses elimination against all odds, even if only temporarily.
"soft weapons: Keep Your Fucking Hands Off My Body" continues at 12 Franklin (12 Franklin Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn) through November 22. The exhibition represents a bold statement about bodily autonomy and resistance in an era of increasing surveillance and control, using art as a weapon of soft power to challenge established norms and celebrate the human form in all its complexity.
