I’m so into you is an exhibition that brings together existing works by Laila Majid and Peng Zuqiang and a new sculpture commission by Dayle Palfreyman. The exhibition starts with a statement of desire and explores points of contact—physical touch, as well as more immaterial forms of connection—with the spaces we inhabit. In these works the self and environment are understood as inextricably linked, continuously [re]constituting one another.

Peng Zuqiang’s film Sight Leak (2022) draws on Roland Barthes’ trip to China with the French avant-garde literary group Tel Quel in 1974. Barthes’ observations were published in Carnets du voyage en Chine (Travels in China) in 2009, subsequent to his death. Filmed in the artist’s hometown of Changsha, Peng’s film deftly refracts the touristic homoerotic projection cast by Barthes, asserting its own queer vernacular as embodied and deliberately ‘mismatching’ from Barthes’ text. Shot in Super 8 and 16mm, Sight Leak dwells on skin, heat, and the peripheral variations of light and darkness that are fundamental to the way we see, and perhaps more accurately, feel spaces.

Majid’s works in the show—two Latex headrest (2022-23) sculptures and a photograph from a series documenting her bathroom mirror post-shower—both initiate and resist associations with the physical body. The wall-mounted sculptures’ leathery surfaces, reminiscent of gym workout equipment or wipe clean club furniture, are left to ‘cure’ or develop over months in the studio, during which they acquire fingerprints from handling and the dull, powdery bloom of dried sweat. The steam print introduces a sense of intimacy into a public setting, while refusing the expectation of seeing one’s reflection. The work is an opaque indication of the artist’s body’s presence, rather than a legible or consumable image.

Palfreyman’s sculpture The loosener of limbs (2024) is 10-metre long handrail made from beeswax and steel: materials associated with human and non-human architectures, toughness and its opposite, malleability. The title is a Sappho reference about losing one’s bodily autonomy in a state of queer love. Able to be gently touched by visitors, the work offers a form of guide or support, suggesting that there is a need to take care when moving through the space, that haptic knowledge and spatial awareness can be a language of survival or necessity as well as pleasure.

I’m so into you is about how our physical bodies come into contact with the world—with architecture, materials, cities, with inherited histories. It proposes an expansive ecology of desire, in which touch and other gestures of contact are mutually transformative. Evading the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of the title, a clear singular subject does not take shape in any of these works. Rather, the overarching mode of address is collective. Here ‘I’ embodies a will to exceed the borders of self-as-individual; the ‘you’ is an accumulation of forces with agency to reciprocate or refuse.

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Dayle Palfreyman is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Palfreyman works with sculpture and installation, primarily using metal and beeswax. Their work explores relationships between desire and repulsion, power and violence, and manipulation and temptation. This is done through materials and objects that demarcate the gallery space, often inviting or repelling touch. Recent exhibitions include To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, 2023; Mimicry, Depot Artspace, Tāmaki Makaurau, 2023; Tilia (with Hendrix Hennessy-Ropiha), City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi Te Whanganui-a-Tara, 2022; On Blushing, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, 2022; and to dissipate, play_station, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, 2020.

Laila Majid lives and works in London. She makes still images, video and sculpture that frequently draw on the signifiers of fetishwear, such as latex, leather and plastics. Majid’s practice explores the ways in which objects, and their surfaces, hold traces of corporeal actions and encounters, often pointing to speculative bodily gestures. Recent solo exhibitions include Things to Come, Sherbet Green and Harlesden High Street, London, 2023; Wipe Clean, Rose Easton, London, 2022; and group exhibitions Come Closer, indigo+madder, London, 2023; HMW, Darren Flook, London, 2023; Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London; Firstsite, Colchester, 2021; and Nude, Fotografiska, Stockholm, New York and Berlin, 2021-23.

Peng Zuqiang lives and works in Amsterdam, where he is currently a resident artist at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2022-24). Peng works with film, video and installations, developing a language of gesture and opacity as forms of reciprocity, counter to dominant regimes of visibility. Recent exhibitions include Sideways Looking, Cell Project Space, London, 2022; Souvenirs of Frictions, e-flux screening room, New York, 2022; Vestiges, Kevin Space, Vienna, 2023; A Story of a Merchant (group exhibition), Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, 2023; Memory is an Editing Station, videobrasil, Sao Paolo, 2023-24; and Dream Time (group exhibition), UCCA, upcoming, 2024, Beijing.

Jess Clifford is a writer, editor and curator from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, to where she has returned after several years working in art galleries and museums in London, most recently for Tate. She works as the editor for CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image and has produced independent writing and editorial projects, including two anthologies of artist lectures for the Städelschule in Germany, which featured texts by Chris Kraus, Lynn Hershman Leesman and Moyra Davey. Recent curatorial projects include To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, 2023.