soft weapons
KEEP YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF MY BODY
curated by Cassandra Neyenesch and Lydia Nobles
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Autumn Breon, Jo Shane and Shiloh Blue, Wildcat Ebony Brown, Airco Caravan, Debra Cartwright, Lena Chen, Christen Clifford, Aaron Cobbett, Courtney Cone, Chris Cortez, Morgan Cousins, Ayanna Dozier, catherine fenton bernath (cfb), Pri the Honeydark, Abreale Hopkins, Aneesa Julmice, Darryl LaVare, Bo Lee, Aullar Mateo, Anna Ting Möller, Jasmine Murrell, Lydia Nobles, Viva Ruiz, Aliza Shvarts, Christl Stringer, Thank God for Abortion, Judith Vivell, Annu Yadav
PRESS FOR SOFT WEAPONS:
NEW YORK — soft weapons: Keep Your Fucking Hands Off My Body, curated by Cassandra Neyenesch and Lydia Nobles, is a 29-person group exhibition exploring how the politicized body, collective memory, and intimate relations operate as counterforces to surveillance, suppression, and systemic violence.
In an era of escalating authoritarianism, the body is a site of innate freedom. Where laws surveil, erase, and punish, the body resists. Desire, care, play, pleasure, and adornment endure as acts of rebellion that cannot be legislated. Each artwork insists on the body’s irreducible autonomy, even when the cost is life itself.
Bringing together artists working across sculpture, painting, installation, film and performance, the corporeal becomes a site of empowerment, sovereignty, and resistance. Echoing Gordon Parks’ view of his camera as a ‘choice of weapon’ and reframing the concept of ‘soft power,’ soft weapons reimagines tenderness, sensuality, and care as political tools through an embodied lens.
soft weapons foregrounds artistic expression as an act of rebellion and witnessing capable of reshaping collective perception. It avows that whether it is trans rights, queer rights, reproductive rights, the rights of the elderly, sex workers, the differently abled, migrants, the unhoused, or the incarcerated, the fight to have freedom over the one thing we truly own, ourselves, is all one fight.
Extending a lineage of artists and activists who have long mobilized their bodies as instruments of defiance, the works in soft weapons insist that tenderness can be insurgent, love revolutionary, and memory a force against erasure. To exist fully and visibly, we reverberate a joy, a soft power that disarms oppression.
Snag a T-shirt, groove with Autumn Breon’s oracle cards, or make a donation to help keep the energy flowing and the art shining.
soft weapons is independently produced and curated and every contribution goes directly to supporting artists, costs, and public programming that keeps this dialogue open to all.
Address:
12 Franklin Street, Brooklyn, NY 11222