For the second format of Concilium 2026, organized in Cremona, Italy, from September 18 to 20, Damien & The Love Guru introduces a duo presentation with artists Vanessa Disler and Slow Reading Club.

Conceived as a hybridisation between an art exhibition and a fair, Concilium’s three-day format in aims to foster polyphonic discourses around the concept of The Inner Body. It draws inspiration from De Lactibus, a treatise published in Milan in 1627 by the Cremonese physician Gaspare Aselli, the discoverer of the lacteal vessels. This relational device invites a reflection on the body as a site where scientific knowledge and humanistic inquiry converge. Within this context, the gallery proposes the concept of a symbiotic arena wherein the flux of selected works by both Disler and Slow Reading Club traverse the canon of the body from within and outward.

Infatuated with oil paint’s rich history and deeply paranoid about its ability to seduce, Vanessa Disler’s practice is driven by this contradiction. At the turn of the twentieth century, movements such as Constructivism, Suprematism, and De Stijl imagined the canvas as a site where abstract—often utopian—projections could be enacted. While that utopian spirit has faded, the freedom abstraction brought to painting remains essential to how she understands the creative act. Disler’s practice is shaped by painting as a way of experiencing and questioning the world. Her paintings and installations occupy a space between abstraction and figuration, where linguistic and material realities blur, gestures move towards codified language, and text collapses into form. Throughout her work, there is a constant refocusing between mark, text, surface, and signification. She employs the body as a thinking instrument, whether touching the surface of a canvas or making marks on the page of a monoprint. In the outmoded territory of psychoanalysis, the hysterical body has been understood as “speaking” from a place inaccessible to conventional language.

For Concilium, Disler will present a large-scale canvas—Rules of the Game (2024), previously shown as part of her solo exhibition Here On Earth at Damien & The Love Guru in Zürich in 2025. The work continues Vanessa Disler’s exploration of painting as a system of notation in which predetermined structures coexist with improvisation. Developed from the artist’s Sleep Scripts, also presented in the format of Concilium, the work treats drawing as a score that guides rather than dictates the making of the painting, allowing repetition to become a catalyst for variation rather than mechanical reproduction. Graphite, pastel, chalk, and acrylic accumulate through successive gestures that preserve the rhythm and pressure of the artist’s movements. Loops, crossings, and linear fragments evoke handwriting, musical notation, or choreographic instruction, while resisting any stable linguistic meaning. Instead, they register the body’s negotiation with the surface, proposing abstraction as an active form of thought rather than the absence of representation.

Rather than deconstructing the canvas, however, Disler extends this legacy by understanding painting as a marker of time: a site where gestures accumulate, perception unfolds, and the image remains open to continual reinterpretation. The “rules” invoked by the title are therefore neither fixed nor prescriptive, but conditions through which the painting continually renews itself, balancing structure with intuition, order with contingency, and repetition with transformation.

Slow Reading Club (SRC) is a semi-fictional reading group initiated by choreographer Bryana Fritz (b. 1989, Illinois, US) and artist/composer Henry Andersen (b.1992, Sydney, AU) in late 2016. The group deals in constructed situations for collective reading. Across a variety of media, SRC looks at, probes, and interrupts ‘readership’ as a way to stimulate the contact zones between reader and text, text and text, reader and reader. Departing sharply from hermeneutics, Slow Reading Club sees text as a site of social contact and contagion. They prefer text’s texture, rhythm, and circulation over its meaning.

In their large-scale choreographic reading performances, Slow Reading Club offers up a set of found texts to be read according to specified protocols, each of which seek to intensify or interrupt some aspect of the habitual reading process. In their exhibitions, principles from the reading sessions are deployed to explore related topics around the collective negotiation of language. These have included the development of an idiosyncratic system for citation (13 Dedications, 2022); working with a student choir to ‘cover’ a marxist choral work (LEARNING, 2024), and an ongoing project to collectively translate the oeuvre of a single poet (Una Broma Colossal, 2020—). Accompanying these activities, they have developed a growing archive of self-published bootleg zines. Their website is a functional shadow library and site for the distribution of found texts. SRC is based between Marseille and Brussels.

Slow Reading Club presents Cloud (Virgilio, Leslie, Marosa), 2026, composed from screen-print on paper, polished aluminum and primed wooden supports, recently shown as part of their solo exhibition Confessions at Damien & The Love Guru in Zurich in Spring 2026, and All Possible Outcomes, 2024, a piece created with Letraset on woven satin ribbons and push pins.

Clouds (Virgilio, Leslie, Marosa), 2026, is conceived as a “retrospective staged for a curved mirror.” Since 2016, Slow Reading Club has developed a large archive of self-published readers. Printed according to available means and freely distributed via performances, the readers play a central role in the practice. Taken as a whole, they map the duo’s artistic education—a growing map of poetry, prose and theory through which they think together. In the sculptural work Clouds (Virgilio, Leslie, Marosa), scans and other ephemera from these publications are restaged via anamorphic distortion. Developed largely as a drawing technique in the European Renaissance, anamorphosis names a set of optical illusions that incorporate perspective distortion into an image so that the ‘true’ image is only revealed from one viewing position, inherently implicating the act of viewing into the image itself.

By recasting this technique for text, SRC similarly implicates the (sited, bodied) reader in the act of reading. To become legible, the pages must be viewed through a mirrored aluminium tube. The tubes act as prosthetes for reading—they displace the habitual act of reading, making it hover between the page, the mirrored surface, and the eye. To read the work, a viewer must consent to be positioned by the sculpture. In this work, many of SRC’s concerns—publication, mediation, choreography and encryption—are simultaneously present. There is pleasure in being deceived.

Vanessa Disler (b. 1987, Vancouver, CA) lives and works in Berlin (DE). She studied at De Ateliers in Amsterdam and Fine Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. In 2025, Disler received a Canada Council Grant and the Swiss Art Awards in 2024. She has been artist in residence at Western Front and CAG Field House in Vancouver, WIELS in Brussels, and The Banff Centre in Alberta. From 2021 -2010 she worked with Nicole Ondre, as Feminist Land Art Retreat. Her work has recently been shown at Kunstforum Baloise Park (Basel, CH), Messeplatz ( Basel, CH), Neun Kelche (Berlin, DE), Fotomuseum Antwerp (Antwerp, BE)*, Barbican Centre (London, UK)*, Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète (Montpellier, FR), Damien & The Love Guru (Zurich, CH and Brussels, BE), Kunsthaus Bregenz (Bregenz, AT)*, WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art ( Brussels, BE), ACUD (Berlin, DE)*, Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, UK), 500 Capp Street Foundation (San Francisco, US), Museum Cultuur Strombeek (Brussels, BE), Kestner Gesellschaft (Hannover, DE), JTT Gallery (New York, US), Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach, DE), MUMOK (Vienna, AT) and BANFF Centre (Alberta, AU) among others.

Performative reading sessions by Slow Reading Club have been presented by institutions including Lafayette Anticipations (FR), WIELS (BE), Cabaret Voltaire (CH), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (BE), Mécènes du Sud (FR), Bergen Kunsthal (NO), MAK-Schindler House (US), TanzQuartier Wien (AT), Rozenstraat (NL), Dortmunder Kunstverein (DE), Festival Sâlmon (ES), VIERNULVIER (BE), and La Loge (BE). Solo exhibitions include Confessions (Damien & The Love Guru, Zurich, 2026); LEARNING (BOEKS, Ghent, 2024), and 13 dedications (Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels, 2022). Selected group shows include Eye Below Ear (Kunsthal Mecheln, 2025), I love C arlo s (RIB, Rotterdam, 2025), and Rosa Rosa Rosae (Masion Pelgrims, Brussels 2021). They were previously artists in residence in Jester, Genk; Fondation CAB, Brussels; and Art by Translation, Los Angeles/Angers. In 2025, SRC published an extensive monograph/artist book—Répondeur—designed by Will Holder and published by Occasional Papers.

* Cloud prints, 2026, screen print on paper, dimensions variable, edition of 10 + 2 AP