reviews > Chicago, IL

Adnan Faysal Altunbozar
Adnan Faysal Altunbozar

What is the space of desire in a world of online dating, chat sites and digital porn? In “Interior Irruptions,” his solo exhibition at Amazigh Contemporary, Adnan Faysal Altunbozar offers the curious viewer a chance to enter an anonymous erotic encounter—quite literally, beginning with the poster announcing the show, which mimicked a certain kind of ad found on Instagram. Having DM’d for the address and hours, take the elevator up and find the very first artwork on view: a pair of spiky steel conches at the end of an extra-long keychain. Follow the chain and find a key to a door to an apartment. Turn it to explore what’s inside: prints of a man’s arm tattooed with a depth gauge—a nod to the outdated average-man stats according to which architecture used to be sized, and a very different nod to the not-so-average-man stats for fisting. A bright blue table holds a cluster of large jars—the kind for selling protein powder to bulk up men to meet some of those stats—remade in delicate ceramic, some with bulging veins. Two smartphones, elegantly mounted on a tripod, scroll the deeply intimate text “SOON I WILL BE IN YOU,” letter by letter, which is how it sometimes goes. Slow can be good. One thing at a time can be good. The whole city lies out below the gallery’s thirty-third-floor glass window-wall, while way up above an encounter not of desire but about it is happening.

—Lori Waxman 2020-02-22 4:27 PM