Muscle Works

Muscle Works

Since 2025 • Artistic project • In progress

Focus
Physical culture • Masculinity • Visual culture

Medium
Photography • Moving images • Performance

Funding
START-Stipend from BMWKMS

References
Michael Anton Budd, Broderick Chow, Jack Halberstam, Laura Mulvey, Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sport

Muscle Works is an ongoing artistic project examining physical culture as an embodied and visual archive of masculinity. The project looks at how bodies are trained, posed, measured, compared, and made visible through exercise manuals, fitness imagery, progress photographs, sports culture, social media, bodybuilding aesthetics, and homoerotic visual codes.

Rather than treating masculinity as a stable identity, Muscle Works approaches it as a repeated theatrical performance: a set of gestures, postures, routines, ideals, and images that are learned, performed, circulated, and inherited. The project asks how physical culture produces bodies that appear disciplined, strong, desirable, or legible, and how these same visual codes can become unstable through exhaustion, failure, exaggeration, or queer misalignment.

The research unfolds through archival image study, staged exercises, photographic sequences, moving image, installation, and sculptural or material experiments. Across these forms, the body becomes both subject and archive: a surface where cultural scripts are stored, rehearsed, interrupted, and transformed.