"Ex Contactu" by Maria Gvardeitseva at Aorta Gallery Pisa | Contemporary Art Exhibition

The Latin phrase ex contactu — “from contact” — once described relics made sacred through touch. In Maria Gvardeitseva’s exhibition at Aorta Gallery, this idea is reimagined: the sacred arises not from distance or canonisation, but from the immediacy of lived experience.

Working with salt, wax, water, and video, Gvardeitseva builds a fragile, dissolving visual language where materials melt, evaporate, and reflect — echoing the impermanence of emotion itself.

Highlights include a sculptural grid of sign language gestures expressing eight emotional states — love, pain, pleasure, joy, birth, betrayal, wound, and orgasm — alongside wax votive figures inspired by Mediterranean devotional practices and a braid sculpture symbolising continuity, care, and maternal legacy.

Rather than monumentalising emotion, Ex Contactu traces its residue: what resists, what disappears, and what transforms. It invites audiences into a secular sacred space — where the body itself becomes both medium and memory.

Curated by Nadzeya Naurotskaya

Ex Contactu. Relics of Pain, Love, and Pleasure