Display Island, 2025

Display Island, 2025

In Display Island, Reis focuses on the physical involvement of participants. The installation activates the viewers’ sensory systems and, in response to the excess of images dominating contemporary visual culture, proposes an alternative mode of engagement—one that operates not primarily through sight, but through bodily and auditory perception. The circular couch installation features a sound work delivered through sound showers shaped like lampshades. The piece takes the form of a spoken, spell-like manifesto. Through layered whispers and declarative voices, it invokes Medusa and the Odalisque as guardians of embodied difference, transforming a critique of patriarchy and the commodification of pleasure into a sensorial act of resistance and remembrance. Interwoven with the voice, a mystical noise is both heard and physically felt through transducer speakers embedded in the couch. In this way, Reis explores new forms of communication between humans and technology grounded in sensuality and intuition. Her works function as laboratories of embodied perception, in which the body is reclaimed as a full-fledged instrument for cognition and interaction with the world. The textile pattern designed by the artist is based on a schematic drawing of a silicone sex toy that simulates anal and vaginal canals. The toy was sectioned in half, its interior 3D-scanned, and translated into a simplified line drawing that maps the different internal channels. By visualizing these simulated cavities, the work reveals how far such representations of female anatomy diverge from bodily reality—producing distorted and ultimately offensive abstractions. These forms are simultaneously concealed beneath a seductive silicone surface, designed to appeal to and attract the user.