by Alison Hugill // Apr. 17, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Abjection.
Sun pours into Dafna Maimon’s Kreuzberg studio on a spring day in March, as we greet each other and prepare for our conversation about the role of the abject in her practice, which encompasses a wide range of media, including painting, video, installation and performance. Just as I’m about to sit down on a wooden chair at her desk, she asks: “Would you like to sit on the turd?” Laughing, I arrange myself on an oversized, lumpy, brown beanbag propped next to the window. Maimon tells me that she made this for a piece that reflected on psychoanalysis, subverting the idea of the Freudian couch as a space of inward reflection, here taking the form of excrement. This kind of gesture is typical of Maimon’s work and overall sense of humor, where hints of the abject course through the veiny canals of nearly all of her pieces. With this in mind, we spoke at length about her recent survey show ‘Symptoms,’ presented at Kiasma in Helsinki last year, which conceptually questioned the cultural primacy of Descartes’ mind-body dualism and foregrounded the importance of embodied knowledge.
Dafna Maimon: ‘Initially a Portrait of Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680),’ 2025, 220 x 140cm, pastel painting on velvet, installation view Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, ‘Symptoms,’ 2025 // Photo by Joe Clark
Alison Hugill: The imagery in ‘Symptoms’ was very visceral—repulsive and compelling at once—meaty organs, fleshy tubes, pimples and leaky teeth. Can you talk about your thinking behind the exhibition? What did the title mean for you?
Dafna Maimon: The title came from starting to look at what would be in the show and realizing that most of the works dealt with people being symptomatic, whether psychosomatically or somatically. The video trilogy in the show—’Leaky Teeth,’ ‘Indigestibles’ and ‘Homebody’— featured characters who are dealing with their bodies. But it’s not just about that, the word is a stand-in or a referent for something bigger; “symptoms” are not things in themselves, but point to something unseen causing it all. I like the idea that everything can be opened up or looked at on a deeper level.
On a more personal level, my works almost always have an autobiographical component, of something that I’ve gone through or questioned. A lot of the time the works came from symptoms: having a problem with digestion or being obsessed with food and overeating, or anxiety, or heartbreak showing up as backache, or suddenly finding myself hormonal and questioning whether I wanted a kid or not. Those questions really start from my own embodied biography and then lead into work and research.
Dafna Maimon: ‘Leaky Teeth,’ 2021/2025, expanded cinema installation / short film, 31 min, 670 x 350 x 250 cm, various materials, dimensions variable, installation view Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, ‘Symptoms,’ 2025 // Copyright Pirje Mykkänen/Finnish National Gallery
AH: In the film ‘Leaky Teeth’ (2021) you really get a sense of the main character June’s futile attempts to repress her tooth pain and the constant flare up. There’s a connection between the leaking tooth and a leak in the modernist architecture of the character’s house in the film. Can you talk about how you are trying to complicate this relationship between the rational / controllable subject and the unruly body?
DM: What you said about experiencing something that you can’t control, that’s kind of the essence of that work. That work was a reaction to my back hernia and having several years of debilitating pain, leading to feeling really unsafe in my body. Loud noise would be difficult, for example, because my nervous system was already overloaded. Or things like psoriasis or acne, these autoimmune diseases I’ve had, that I find quite sad, because it’s basically your defenses turning against you. There’s a moment when you realize you can’t will this stuff away and you realize that we are holistic organisms. It is funny, that it is a shock to us that we can’t control everything.
With the title ‘Leaky Teeth,’ I really like these kinds of oxymorons or word pairings that fit but don’t quite make sense, and therefore reveal something. Bone is porous. We think of it as something hard but it’s actually full of fluid. The older we get the less fluid there is and then it’s more brittle. Teeth are similar to bone, and I was thinking of the idea that hardness is not always hard—there’s flexibility and porosity. From there, I thought about sponges. I love them because they are a perfect image of what we are as humans: we absorb and leak, whether ideology or gestures or bodily fluids, outside of our control. In making titles, I love trying to find something that makes you go: “wait, what?”
AH: Yeah, it’s really psychologically disturbing to imagine your teeth leaking or being like sponges.
DM: With ‘Leaky Teeth’ I was thinking about physical pain a lot. How our nervous system picks up information that our cells are sending. What’s the difference between a thought and pain? We have a hierarchy where we want to get rid of pain, but consider thought as this amazing, “rational” thing. When in both cases something is being expressed, yet one is dismissed.
In the video, there’s a cave within an orifice, in a tooth, it’s leaky and open; a home to bacteria. The cavepeople in the video are like an embodiment of some ancient DNA or knowledge in the body. Wisdom teeth, for example, were there at one point because we needed them. They are a relic now, but could there be actual wisdom in these teeth? June goes through a transformation in the film and disappears, and then we have a caveperson running around in her modernist house. They are rendered interchangeable. She is a really uptight character, she has a calendar where she schedules when to drink water. But eventually she succumbs to this other self through pain.
Dafna Maimon: ‘Indigestibles: Then There’s Today,’ 2021, video still // Courtesy of Dafna Maimon
AH: In a lot of your films, like ‘Indigestibles,’ there are close ups of really disturbing, grotesque imagery, like gnawing on a chicken bone or repeatedly touching an injured tooth with the tongue. What draws you to these kinds of imagery?
DM: There’s something in my personality that is just interested in these images, but it’s also what I am trying to do with my work on a political level. I had a conversation with my mom the other day about my health, and I said “it seems like all my physical issues make it sound like I’ve been a professional athlete. I’ve always kind of sought out pain, or gone to my limits,” and she said: “well, you are a masochist.” She’s saying this as someone who knew me even before I knew myself. So, I’ve always had this fascination with picking at things, like scabs. I couldn’t wait for my teeth to fall out, I’d yank them out.
On the other hand, the abject is about something in transformation, something that is rotting or leaking, or contaminating. As a theme, it opens up what we actually are: embodied creatures, organisms that are porous and die. So much of our culture is trying to avoid the fact that we are also animals, and so long as we are able to hide that, we can really abuse other animals, too, or make crazy distinctions and hierarchies. That’s how we get into questions of, for example, female biology being less valued because it leaks or contains more orifices.
Moving toward the abject is really about uncovering that humans are mammals, fragile and porous. What’s the difference between the natural and the abject? Forming pus is a natural healing mechanism of the body, yet we try to separate or disregard this by making it abject.
Dafna Maimon: ‘Indigestibles,’ 2021, installation view Helsinki Biennial, 2021 // Photo by Maija Toivanen
AH: In your ‘Indigestibles’ installation, as well as other installations and performances you’ve done in the past, you create an enlarged version of a body part (intestine, toe, etc) that visitors can then inhabit to a certain extent. How do you play with scale to enhance the feeling of abjection in this way?
DM: Grotesque and abject are a bit different, but both are a form of exaggeration. It’s a way to show what’s already there, by enhancing it. The scale follows different desires. With ‘Indigestibles’ I started from seeing the space where I initially installed it—an ammunition cellar on an island in Helsinki, as part of the Biennial. I went into the tunnel, a space they didn’t even want to show me because it was an undesirable space, so of course I immediately wanted to see it. It felt like a subterranean, murky place and I immediately thought: “this should be a gut.” The next desire was that I didn’t want people to just look at it, but to be in it, to be swallowed by it. Sometimes by magnifying something, it becomes a landscape or a whole world. It’s not always direct or obvious, sometimes it’s more associative. But I am insisting on attention for a certain detail. A lot of the works are about celebrating the body and its wisdom, but it’s easier to remind people of their bodies by poking at something a little bit abject than by saying: “look how beautiful it is, the way your cells organize themselves!” And my direction is always one of humor, because it’s democratizing. And that means looking at myself through a lens where I am equally implicated.
Dafna Maimon: ‘Damp Footnotes,’ 2022, performance documentation, Gossip Gossip Gossip, Berlin Kunstbrücke am Wildenbruch // Photo by Victoria Tomaschko
AH: The toes in your piece ‘Damp Footnotes’ are also a good example of that. They are enlarged and personified as your friends.
DM: And they were initially made to be drunk from—you bring the toe to your mouth. A few years ago, I got a letter from Charite with a questionnaire asking if I’d consider pre-chewing my food for my baby, if I had one. I had read about this in a book by a Finnish Sculptor called Viivi Vallgren, where she recounts her childhood in rural Finland in the late 1800s.
There are so many different cultural contexts and constructs that determine the abject. It’s what I find so interesting about it, that over time we have decided to reject some things in order to separate ourselves from the natural world. This goes into ideology as well, as humans distinguish what’s clean or proper in terms of gender or race. It’s a source of some really fucked up ideas.
Dafna Maimon: ‘Interior Motives: The Musical,’ 2025, performance 60 min., Kiasma Theatre // Photo by Pirje Mykkänen, courtesy of Finnish National Gallery of Art/ Kiasma
AH: In your newest video installation ‘Homebody’ (2025) the characters perform a musical narration of their symptoms, very detailed and embodied. At Kiasma the audience sat on cushions that looked like massive pimples. You’ve talked about your work as a “choreography of daily life” but it’s more than the mundane, it’s really abject. What role does shame play in your work, if any?
DM: I’m always fascinated by trying to find the things that one wouldn’t say out loud, that cross the boundaries of what is ok or “normal to voice.” The piece is based on a somatic method that I developed called ASOCS (Authentic-Stream-of-Consciousness-Singing), which I built from something that exists, called “Authentic Movement.” It’s a movement practice where you move with your eyes closed and listen to how your body wants to move. You have a witness and afterwards you have an exchange about what happened.
I was interested in what would happen if I exchanged the movement for singing. I was enchanted by how using voice and singing was opening up some really magical spaces for me. The sounds we make in daily life are quite limited, compared to what we are capable of.
In ‘Homebody,’ they are tapping into the body. The quest is to listen to what’s going on and then to voice it. This then spirals into other associations. It was about mapping the connection between body and mind.
The most shameful moment in the film, for me, is when one of the performers looks at herself in the mirror and sings that she wants to be the best. She’s digging in her ear, and it moves from a meditation on earwax to asking herself if her organs can sweat. She travels through this whole physical thing and then in the end she sings about wanting to be the best. For me, that’s the most abject moment because it’s really admitting something that I think everyone wants but is a futile quest. That might say something rather about me and my biography, whereas someone else might not find that shameful.
Shame is super individual. How much of our daily thinking is just observing something weird about our bodies or internal sensations? When it is said out loud, it’s kind of comforting to realize we all do that, that we have this in common. It works to override the shame or abjection, in fact it is mundane.
