AKINCI proudly presents Thinking through Touch, an exhibition by Melanie bonajo during Amsterdam Art Week. The exhibition will be opened during Festive Gallery Night on 22 May between 17:00 and 21:00.
This exhibition brings together video works with scenography by Théo Demans, grounded in queer, feminist, anti-ableist, and anti-racist perspectives on the body, sexuality, and intimacy. It emerges from movements that centre embodied knowledge, radical softness, and the right to pleasure beyond societal norms.
The works respond to a world shaped by control, extraction, and exclusion—where power dictates which bodies are heard, held, or disregarded. They reveal how systems shape our ability to connect, while offering alternatives rooted in consent, care, and bodily autonomy. They pose the question: what happens when we reclaim intimacy from systems that divide us—systems that decide who is protected, and who is not?
Throughout these works, intimacy is neither privatised nor pathologised.
Touch is resilience.
It is a collective practice. It is political.
