Workout exhibition and private view at the Bottle Factory on 25 April:
Some sprint on treadmills that never move, others climb invisible ladders with broken rungs. The arena is uneven, the rules unwritten, and the scoreboard flickers with false promises. WORKOUT from OHSH is an exhibition that breaks a sweat over the big stuff: our cultural obsession with fitness, body image, and the uneasy balance between discipline and desire.
But beyond the visible exertion, it asks a more fundamental question— not just how we strive, but why we feel the need to measure at all. For decades, social critics have argued that the quest for physical perfection often mirrors broader societal pressures. Susan Bordo observed that the slender, toned body — especially the female body— has become a text on which culture writes its ideals.
Dieting and punishing workout routines, she argued, are less about “health” as personal choice and more about cultural coercion. In this light, thinness and fitness are not simply personal goals — they’re expectations enforced by a gaze that is both media-saturated and male-dominated.
Michel Foucault similarly explored how power inscribes itself on the body, creating what he called “docile bodies”: trained, monitored, and idealised forms shaped to fit normative standards. In the gym, as in society, we internalise this surveillance — tracking our worth in calories burned and reps completed, always under the imagined eye of others. The artists in WORKOUT confront these pressures directly, rendering the invisible weight of expectation tangible.
You can catch this thought provoking exhibition until the 23 May.