BERLIN: On a Sunday evening during Gallery Weekend 2026, in Casey Spooner‘s newly opened studio on Mollstraße, a body became a sculpture. For the inaugural formal edition of Sunday Salon, conceived by the American multidisciplinary artist and curated and produced by Berlin-based independent curator Ameesia Marold, Spooner reclined as a living odalisque while Turkish-Bosnian painter and sculptor Serkan Sarier transformed him into a sculptural tableau. Staged among Sarier’s layered oil paintings on jute and Spooner’s bronze sculptures, the performance, titled Corrupting Gaze, unfolded in three movements, from stillness to sound, from endurance to collapse.
What began as a single evening has since evolved into an ongoing conversation between its three collaborators. Rather than reconstructing the event from a single point of view, the pages that follow unfold like a shared diary: Marold reflects on the curatorial framework that brought the work into being, Spooner writes from inside the physical and psychological experience of inhabiting the sculpture, and Sarier situates the performance within the art-historical lineage of the reclining nude. Together, their texts reveal what happened that night, and, even more importantly, how the work continues to resonate beyond its singular moment.
The Work
AMEESIA MAROLD:
Berlin Gallery Weekend has always functioned as a kind of pressure test, a moment when the city’s art infrastructure reveals what it actually believes in, not just what it can sell. This year, we decided to present something outside the gallery frame entirely. On a Sunday evening, in Casey Spooner’s new studio on Mollstrasse, we staged a work that turned a body into sculpture and deeply integrated the practices of two very different artists into one extreme moment to be witnessed.
Casey has been hosting informal Sunday gatherings in Berlin for months, loose, social late afternoons that he calls the Sunday Salon. When we began talking about formalizing one of these for Gallery Weekend in the new studio, it became clear that this iteration needed to present an artistic practice in a serious, but also experimental and playful way.
What emerged was a collaboration between Casey and Serkan Sarier that turned Casey’s body into a site of art-historical confrontation, staged alongside a series of paintings and sculpture by each respective artist, all deeply interconnected in inspiration and aesthetic. Serkan transformed Casey into a living sculpture, a reclining figure on a low divan that cited the European odalisque tradition while systematically dismantling it. The result was a three-part performance moving from stillness to movement, object to subject, silence to release.
“Everything in the space spoke to everything else, a single vocabulary of flesh, fabrication, and transformation, distributed across media and unified by the room.”
The studio held more than the performance. Casey’s Death Beach Phallus bronzes, oxidised, totemic, unmistakably carnal, sat in proximity to his own nude form inside the suit. Serkan’s paintings, The Dissolution of Caine and Abel I & II, Snowman, and a series of untitled oils on jute, surrounded the divan, their figures dissolving and morphing across the canvas in ways that rhymed directly with the body on the chaise.
As a curator, I am interested in revealing how an artistic practice can extend beyond the expected and produce something entirely novel whilst inevitably drawing on the long lineage of art history, reflecting it back through the lens of personal experience and the now. I find that the best work happens when you let artists find the medium between their practices, something that feels deeply connected, whilst each maintains their own strengths. The conceptual framework Serkan built was precise and historically grounded. Casey’s commitment to inhabiting it was total.
The performance unfolded in three movements. First: silence, stillness, and the absurd endurance of holding the pose, as Casey tested how long an audience would accept the illusion. Second: a recorded piece of Casey speaking sutras from Lorin Roche’s The Radiance Sutras (Roche, who passed away the very week of the performance), lip-synced with an intensity that cracked the sculpture open slowly, turning static form into something invocational. Third: music, Casey’s primary art form, where the body finally moved with and through sound, and what had been tension became something closer to a slow-moving grace.
What follows are Casey’s and Serkan’s own accounts of the work, written independently. This was always a three-way conversation, best understood through the resonance between our different positions within it.
Inside the Body
CASEY SPOONER:
I love ideas. I love images. I love telling stories. I love transforming. I love collaboration. But sometimes I make choices that put me in positions that I don’t fully understand until I am in the middle of the action with no one to blame but myself. Performing the Odalisque in my studio in collaboration with Serkan Sarier was one of these challenges.
The full body latex suit filled with metal balls and in repose on a divan as a living sculpture was a challenge in ways I wasn’t prepared for. Once I got into position and the audience entered the space, my reality completely shifted, a psychological state that made me question the passage of time: my role as a slave to an audience, and simply the inability to hold a pose and ultimately to remain conscious.
I was committed to making people believe I was an inanimate object. But anxiety really set in when I had to negotiate between discomfort and the passage of time. I had to focus on mind control and find ways to breathe through the mental hurdles. I had to stop looking at the audience and looked towards the floor. At times, I couldn’t catch my breath and had to calm myself with square breathing. I dreamed of moving. Eventually collapse came, and my ability to think about anything but survival was impossible. It was not a pleasant experience.
But the minute the pre-recorded spoken text started to play I came to life. The adrenaline of being creative in real time with all of my faculties kicked in. I knew it was a good idea; I was a good idea; I was the idea.
“To be powerful when you are on the brink of physical and mental collapse. I think the soul may be most visible in these moments of extreme fatigue, because there’s just enough energy to exist. Not enough energy to act or project. Just to be. Just to be inside the image.”
Much of my artistic work has been about desire, about how desire is constructed and projected. But recently, I have felt a certain fatigue with the constant projections of desire and “hotness” in popular culture. The fact that the Odalisque is considered erotic seems absolutely absurd to a contemporary eye. I thought much about what the odalisque is: a slave not yet a concubine, a servant in private quarters, in hopes of ascending into the power of being a sexual worker. In the arts there is a long debate between being a whore and an artist, a dichotomy rife with moral judgments and tangled in structures of money and power. When, in fact, I believe creative energy and sexual energy are deeply connected. It is from this mysterious and elusive energy that creation comes.
To cast myself as a most hideous wannabe concubine was a rather exciting character to play. To embody an image of power that is fascinating and grotesque was liberating. It was thrilling to be ugly and not try to manufacture a traditional image of desirability. To be “hot” is no longer transgressive in the way it felt 20 years ago; it symbolizes a kind of absorption into the late-stage capitalist attention economy that makes the human increasingly disposable and forgettable.
The Critique
SERKAN SARIER:
This work situates itself within and against the long, highly coded history of the reclining nude. From the Grande Odalisque by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Manet’s Olympia, the horizontal body has historically been staged for prolonged viewing: oriented toward the gaze, composed, and offered as a site of controlled eroticism. Ingres, in particular, stretches the body into impossibility, producing not a person but a fantasy, passive, othered, and rendered for consumption.
The body sculpture echoes that lineage through the pose itself. Reclined on a chaise-like structure, one arm supporting the head, the figure presents itself frontally, unmistakably citing the odalisque tradition. Yet that familiarity quickly destabilizes. The surface, stretched and semi-translucent, reads as a second skin: artificial, prosthetic, almost clinical. Metallic forms interrupt the body, not as natural anatomy but as inserts, implants, foreign presences. The illusionistic softness of painting gives way to a body that feels assembled rather than given. The face, obscured or flattened, withholds psychological access. Where the historical nude invites the gaze, this figure resists it.
In doing so, the work opens a queer reading of the reclining nude. This tradition has never been neutral; it structures who looks and who is made visible. Here, the body refuses stable categorization. It moves between genders, its forms ambiguous, its surfaces suggestive of fabrication rather than biology. Desire becomes unsettled by estrangement. Rather than passively consuming the image, one becomes aware of the act of looking itself, its assumptions, its habits, its power.
The sculpture departs, too, from the Orientalist framework of the odalisque. Otherness is no longer projected onto a distant geography, but onto the body itself, rendered synthetic, modified, post-human, a site of intervention resonant with contemporary discourses on queer embodiment, cyborg theory, and the aesthetics of fetish and medicalization. The chaise longue, once tied to leisure and bourgeois intimacy, now holds a body that appears constrained rather than relaxed. Comfort becomes tension; display becomes exposure.
If the odalisque once declared, “Here is a body for your gaze,” this work responds differently: “Here is a body that reveals how that gaze is constructed.”
What the Room Set in Motion
AMEESIA MAROLD:
Casey felt it as survival. Serkan conceived it as critique. I experienced it as something that held both of those truths simultaneously and produced a third feeling that belonged to the room itself.
This August, Spooner premieres Lovers Loving Lovers in Love as the main act of the Fondation Beyeler Summer Festival: a continuation of his exploration of Eros and Thanatos that moves the same themes of endurance, ritual, the body as both subject and object.
Seen from here, Sunday Salon looks like the chamber version of an idea about to go symphonic. The studio was where the body was made, still enough to be looked at properly. Sunday Salon was conceived as a framework, not a one-off, a way to hold serious, demanding work inside an artist’s studio, outside the institutional frame but without apology for ambition. Its first articulation turned a body into a question.