On an unreasonably cold day in the formerly industrial part of Greenpoint that feels like the edge of the world, I pushed through the heavy doors of 12 Franklin to look at photographs of the inside of a vagina taken by a sex toy camera. Whew. That’s one way to warm up.
soft weapons: Keep Your Fucking Hands Off My Body, an exhibition of works by 29 artists curated by Cassandra Neyenesch and Lydia Nobles, takes its name from the concept of “soft power” — influence exercised through means other than force — and Gordon Parks’s famous declaration that his camera, that is, art-making, was his “choice of weapon.” The body, it argues, is a site of freedom, a method to resist forces of suppression, surveillance, and systemic violence.
Indeed, this is one of those shows that made me keenly aware of my own body through space. Aneesa Julmice’s etching-on-paper work “The Trinity” (2025), for instance, mounted high on one of the cavernous space’s support beams, is angled downward like the surveillance camera it depicts, compelling you into the act of watching yourself move through the space. A number of works incorporate seating, but each is unique, prompting me to notice how my body responded differently to varied textures, heights, sensations; Nobles’s As I Sit Waiting (2019–ongoing) sculptures, which highlight the stories of those who’ve had abortions or were forced to carry their pregnancies, draw explicitly on bodily actions of leaning, sagging, and resisting.
Aliza Shvarts’s “Dark Play” (2025), meanwhile, takes the form of plastic cones arranged in a large ring, each printed with a numbered text about bodily autonomy (or lack thereof), drawing the viewer into a kind of spellcasting: silently voicing incantatory phrases while moving in preordained patterns across time and space. A long line of duct tape on the floor leads you out of the main gallery with the storybook instruction to “follow the yellow brick road to the media room,” where a flood of extremely hot air might make you wonder if this space is legally habitable. Inside, Ayanna Dozier’s 16mm film “Nightwalker” (2022) creepily follows a sex worker up a subway escalator, the video’s soft glow in the dark creating a sense of wandering through a red-light district. And for good measure, the sound of a crying baby starts up every now and again back in the main gallery, awakening some bodily instinct within me that I often forget I have.
Film still of Ayanna Dozier, “Nightwalker” (2022), super 8mm to 16mm film, color (image courtesy 12 Franklin)
There, Christen Clifford’s “Interior Portrait: Tunnel 28” (2021), a more than four-by-five-foot (~1.2 x 1.5 m) dye sublimation print of what looks like the inside of a rectum, set atop a soft chair whose material is printed with the same pattern, really drives home the name of the series: We Are All Pink Inside (2018–ongoing). Meanwhile, it was impossible to look upon the pixellated patches of hot and cool pink shadowed with blooms of maroon and violet in the nearly seven-foot-across (~2.1 m) “INTERIOR 0502” (2018) and not see myself reflected upon the plexiglass on top, as if I were but a small piece of its sublime landscape.
The work overwhelms in multiple senses of the word: We often speak of “penetrating” the vagina, but why not its opposite, of the vagina subsuming? That’s what came to mind here: the pixellation evokes an overload of information, the body literally overpowering technology. In the caption, Clifford takes pains to emphasize that these images are unedited, with no digital or color manipulation — in short, the very opposite of the FaceTuned hyper-smoothed pictures we normally encounter. Monumental, rather than miniaturized to a scale the consumer can easily overpower — a tabloid cover, a digital screen — it resists capitalist consumption.
It’s fitting that this exhibition occupies an interstitial space: a room a developer friend of the curators allowed them to use before it’s inevitably rented out — this is waterfront property in New York City, after all. Like a weed sprouting between the cracks in pavement, the exhibition asserts a living, corporeal presence that refuses elimination against all odds, if only for the moment.
Christen Clifford, “Interior Portrait: Tunnel 28” (2021), dye sublimation print on silver disband
Installation view of soft weapons: Keep Your Fucking Hands Off My Body, featuring works by Airco Caravan
Installation view of soft weapons: Keep Your Fucking Hands Off My Body, with part of Aliza Shvarts, “Dark Play” (2025), in the foreground
Installation view of soft weapons: Keep Your Fucking Hands Off My Body, with works by Courtney Cone in the foreground
soft weapons: Keep Your Fucking Hands Off My Body continues at 12 Franklin (12 Franklin Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn) through November 22. The exhibition was curated by Cassandra Neyenesch and Lydia Nobles.
