The Politics of Vulnerability: The Tender Brutalities of Being Seen

Sierra Ayers — Rachel Crane — Victoria Luna

Curated by Luciano Ratto

Produced by Ugly Child

On Display at Cannonball Arts 08/15 - 10/16

This exhibition examines how vulnerability has become a battleground in contemporary culture, where the personal is both political and profitable. The artists gathered here navigate the charged terrain between exposure and exploitation, asking urgent questions about agency, authenticity, and resistance in an image-saturated world.

The politics of vulnerability are complex and contradictory. Women and femme-identified individuals face impossible demands: be authentic but not too raw, be open but maintain boundaries, share your truth but make it marketable. Social media platforms and consumer culture have transformed intimate revelation into currency, while surveillance capitalism harvests our most personal data for profit. In this context, vulnerability becomes both a form of expected labor and a potential site of power.

Michel Foucault's analysis of disciplinary power illuminates how contemporary visual culture operates as a mechanism of control. The constant invitation to reveal ourselves, to be transparent, authentic, vulnerable, functions as what he would recognize as a form of biopower, managing populations through the production of knowledge about bodies and desires. The confessional imperative of social media echoes Foucault's observations about how power operates not through repression but through incitement to discourse. We are compelled to speak, to show, to make ourselves visible, believing this visibility grants us agency when it may actually serve systems of surveillance and control.

These artists refuse to accept vulnerability as either purely empowering or simply exploitative. Instead, they work within the productive tension between showing and concealing, recognition and refusal. Their cameras become tools for investigating the structures that shape how bodies, particularly femme bodies, are seen, valued, and consumed. Some artists in this exhibition strategically deploy opacity, creating images that resist easy consumption or categorization. Others examine the violence inherent in photographic looking, questioning who holds the camera, who profits from exposure, and what consent means in a visual economy. Still others explore how marginalized bodies and experiences can exceed the frames designed to contain them, spilling beyond commercial or patriarchal expectations.

These works suggest that contemporary resistance might not lie in perfect authenticity, itself a construction, but in revealing the manufactured nature of the systems that demand our transparency. Following Bataille's logic of expenditure, perhaps the value of these works lies not in what they produce but in what they waste, the comfortable assumptions they destroy, the easy categories they refuse, the simple narratives of empowerment they complicate.This exhibition does not offer solutions to the politics of vulnerability, but rather insists on the importance of the questions themselves. They propose that true agency might emerge not from controlling how we're seen, but from disrupting the assumed right to see, to know, and to profit from our exposure.

Luciano Ratto