Mahalia Giotto, known as taje (they/them), examines how bodies are represented and read. Rooted in their experience as a transmasculine, non-binary artist, their practice approaches intimacy as a political site, where personal experience encounters the social structures that shape how we see ourselves and others.
In on the verge of becoming completely forgotten (incubation), taje turns their attention to masculinity, treating it less as a fixed identity than as a condition that is embodied, performed and transmitted. Their own body becomes the site of this examination, at once exposed and difficult to fully access. The desire to look closer comes with the discomfort of doing so.
As the first chapter in a series, incubation opens an ongoing exploration of masculinity as something that circulates between bodies and through society, capable of contamination, but also of mutation. Rather than searching for a cure, the work leaves open what might emerge from this transformation.
