Short Cuts - Part II: The Thing That Enjoys Itself by Zorica Čolić

Reception Rome is pleased to present Part II - The Thing That Enjoys Itself, the second and final part of Short Cuts, Zorica Čolić’s first solo exhibition in Italy. In Part I - The Split, Čolić examines the notion of a body that is observed, measured, desired and dismantled from the outside through a series of collages, video, and sculpture. In this second part, the artist examines what becomes of desire once it has been handed over to the world of things. A two-channel video installation fills the gallery space. In The Thing That Enjoys Itself commodities come alive to speak about their implications on human enjoyment and sexual pleasure. The videos are composed of short animated clips/ads of sex toys that resemble human, animal or abstract forms, and are treated as animate, independent beings: vibrating, licking, tickling, rotating, penetrating and squeezing other inanimate objects. These fevered, looped motions evoke modes of desiring and resisting, excitation and frustration. Invested with an agency that belongs to humans, these "living things" discuss the alienating aspects of our enjoyment, value production and sexuality that became calculable. Through these seemingly autonomous objects, the work stages a peculiar economy of pleasure, in which enjoyment becomes a relentless activity, detached from any clear purpose or fulfillment. At the heart of the work lies the concept of jouissance. In everyday French, the word means enjoyment and also carries the connotation of orgasm. Psychoanalysis, and above all Jacques Lacan, turned it into one of its most elusive concepts. For Lacan, jouissance is not simply pleasure. Pleasure has a limit: it seeks balance, satisfaction and rest. Jouissance pushes beyond that limit, persisting even beyond the point of satisfaction. It is what keeps us scrolling, buying and wanting more of what no longer satisfies us. In a world of infinite possibilities, endless novelty and infinite scrolling, this imperative takes on a particular urgency. The promise of limitless pleasure becomes a demand for its continuous production. Čolić’s objects embody this contradiction: they keep moving, performing and seeking stimulation, caught in a cycle whose momentum seems impossible to interrupt. Their mechanical autonomy reflects a contemporary condition in which desire is endlessly reactivated, while satisfaction remains perpetually out of reach. The title echoes a remark from Lacan’s seminar Encore: “a body”, he suggests, “is something that enjoys itself”. In Čolić’s work, the body that enjoys itself is no longer necessarily human. It is a thing, animated by a drive that seems to belong neither to the object nor to its maker. As in the first part of the exhibition, humour is Čolić’s method. The toys are ridiculous, tireless and strangely touching. Their exaggerated performances expose the absurdity of a system in which enjoyment becomes an obligation and repetition passes for fulfillment. Yet as the loop unfolds, the comedy gives way to something quieter and more melancholic. The machines seem to exhaust themselves, submerged in a pool of their own surplus jouissance. Funny, obscene and unsettling, The Thing That Enjoys Itself leaves the viewer with a question that is more than theoretical: who, or what, is doing the enjoying?