Chandelier is proud to present ‘feeling all the feelings’, a solo exhibition by Roberta Cotterli. In a series of sculptures that linger on the female body and its remnants (underwear, traces, fragments), Cotterli explores our contradictions and imperfections through gestures of presence and absence, potential and loss.
When Britney Spears released the video for ‘Everytime’ in 2004, it instantly became a millennial emblem of torment for young women. Its credibility was amplified by the real-life turmoil surrounding Britney a few years later: her head-shaving rebellion, her public unravelling under the pressures of fame, and, as we later learned, the suffocating control of her own family.
The video follows her mercilessly hounded by paparazzi and fans, neglected by and eventually locked in an aggressive fight with her boyfriend. She ends her life by drowning in a bathtub: her hair wet, tinged red, her eyeliner thick and smeared. For years, the video has stood as a cultural shorthand for pain, resilience, and
transformation. Indeed, I feel I’ve been waiting for 20 years to use it as a cultural reference in some way. And yet, the ending unsettles: she emerges from the water untouched. She is reborn.
The bathtub itself is a vessel heavy with symbolism: birth, death, intimacy, annihilation. Wolfgang Tillmans’ ‘Jochen Taking a Bath’, Lee Miller’s infamous photograph of herself bathing in Hitler’s apartment, and Jacques-Louis David’s ‘Death of Marat’ are just a few examples that come to mind. For Cotterli, however, the bathtub is more than a repository of meanings and references; it is a place of retreat where we make some of our most as well as some of our least important decisions – each of them with a power to alter the course of our life, or even just a day. In ‘Shapeshifter’, Cotterli explores these possibilities in one sweep; with a clarity that no matter where we go, we always come back to who we are. Her sculptural bathtubs are mirrored doubles – two states in tension when we are utterly alone: the deserved intimacy of relaxation juxtaposed with the sharp edge of anxiety and fear.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, ‘Soft serve’ presents a woman riding assuredly atop a teetering pile of saddles. As she glances over the spectator, she emanates confidence and dominance with an undeniable vulnerability mirrored in the fragile material and instability of the structure. This paradox is at the centre of
Cotterli’s practice. The work vibrates with sexual allusion and contradiction, capturing the multiplicity of what a person can be, thinks she must be, or fears she can never become.
The dreamlike quality of the disappearing bodies continues to reflect in the edition titled ‘25.02.2025’. The alternate universe, which allows these fragments of women to exist on their own, the context of the exhibition itself, prompts us to wonder in which ways they are also part of us. Cotterli brings this to the point by speaking directly to us: Your light is different, you are fluorescent.
The work ‘Hangover’ takes the form of two resin casts of discarded underwear – the garment also connects all the bodies in the exhibition. Once intimate, functional, and protective, the underwear has been flattened and rendered unusable. It no longer holds the body; it has lost its volume, its purpose. What remains is an empty shell, a fragile trace of the flesh that it once contained.
As we are surrounded by these headless bodies made of resin and jesmonite, it becomes clear that their fading represents our own incompleteness, while the clashes in material evoke our own contradictions within. The body continues to dissolve in and outside of this alternate universe: through age, through effort,
through our faltering attempts to succeed, to love, to sustain friendships, to make money, to relax, to be fulfilled. Can we really be all of these things, all at once, all the time? Cotterli’s answer is simple and unsparing: no. But we also don’t have to.
WRITTEN BY DANA ŽAJA