16/10/2026
Pia Camil’s solo exhibition, ‘Bestia’, is now on display at Elizabeth Xi Bauer.
When developing ‘Bestia’, Camil took inspiration from Audre Lorde, a self-proclaimed ‘black, le***an, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet’ whose writings offer welcome alternatives to mainstream views of the world. She fought tirelessly against social injustices, whatever forms these might take – ‘there is no hierarchy of oppressions’, she famously wrote in a 1983 essay. In one of her most eminent texts, ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, Lorde locates the nature of the erotic ‘as a source of power and information’, which, she argues, is deliberately confused by men with po*******hy to undermine this intrinsic feminine power. ‘When I speak of the erotic’, Lorde wrote, ‘I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives’. Therefore, to frame agency as promiscuity is not only wrong but obscene.
Curated by Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes.
1-3. ‘Deseo’ (detail), 2026. Oil on cotton canvas with window shutters and metal hinges, 84.5 x 129 x 4 cm (shutters open)
Photographs courtesy of Richard Ivey
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Bestia
Pia Camil
9th October – 22nd November
Wednesday to Sunday from 12-6 pm
Elizabeth Xi Bauer
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20-22 Exmouth Market,
London, EC1R 4QE
020 3048 5220
[email protected]
