The Unfixable Gaze: On Laura Lima's The Drawing Drawing (2026)

The oldest problem in art is also the most violent: to draw something is to stop it. To frame a subject is to declare it finished. Western representational tradition has long depended on this act of arrest, the belief that a skilled enough eye, a steady enough hand, might fix the living world into stable form. Laura Lima's The Drawing Drawing, presented across the lower and upper galleries of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from 27 January to 29 March 2026, refuses that premise entirely. Working through motorised platforms, live performers, and the sheer stubborn aliveness of bodies in motion, Lima stages what traditional image-making has always suppressed: the impossibility of the gaze itself. To look, her exhibition insists, is not to know. It is to participate in a continuous, collective act of becoming. The epistemological stakes could not be higher. If we cannot fix what is alive, then every image is a type of mourning.

Lima was born in 1971 in Governador Valadares, Brazil, and came of age under the shadow of the military dictatorship that governed the country until 1985. That context is not incidental. Power, in Lima’s lexicon, is always a question of who controls the body: whose movements are permitted, whose stillness is enforced, whose flesh becomes instrument. Her foundational concept, pessoa=carne (person=flesh), refuses any hierarchy between human and object: a performer, a motor, a piece of wood occupy equivalent ontological ground, all of them matter subject to force. What changes is the political charge, the violence, latent or explicit, of placing bodies in motion within institutional space. To draw a body, in Lima's hands, is never an innocent act.

The ICA's lower and upper galleries carry the formal gravity of their Neoclassical origins: high ceilings, civic proportion, the implicit authority of the institution. Lima's installation exploits this contrast deliberately. The machines she introduces are not elegant. They are loud, slightly ungainly, contemporary in the most stubborn sense. They refuse to disappear into the architecture that houses them. The institution frames the work, but the work does not flatter the institution back.

The sound arrives before anything visual registers. Across both levels of the exhibition, a mechanical clicking runs as constant undercurrent. Clinical in its precision. Anxious in its tempo. Metallic in its effect. It does not accompany the work so much as produce a condition for it: a low-level tension, a sense of time being marked at a speed slightly faster than comfort allows. The wall text describes Lima’s concern with matter that “vibrate[s], rust[s], smell[s], breathe[s]”, and this sound is the exhibition’s proof of concept, a fabricated nervous system running beneath everything else. To stand inside it is to feel, immediately, that the exhibition is not simply spatial but temporally pressurised. Something is always being counted.

The lower gallery structures the viewer's encounter with unusual precision. Six mechanised circular wooden platforms occupy the room, distributed across the space with the logic of a system rather than a composition. On one, a nude model. On each of the other five, a wooden bench and a wooden easel, scattered with used crayons, blunt and waxy, like evidence of activity perpetually preceding one's arrival. To sit here is not a neutral act; the circle selects a perspective for you. Vision is not freely owned, but structurally arranged and in constant motion: each platform is programmed to glide continuously, slowly and unpredictably through the space. The room does not offer a vantage point. It offers a position that will be taken from you before you have finished with it. This is Lima's deeper choreographic logic: spectatorship is never innocent, never self-directed, and always already shaped by the conditions of the room.

What emerges from those platforms is something the notes of a closing-day visitor might struggle to name: a synergy of dancing observers. All at once, visitors are watching the same thing, yet each produces a different relation to it. Some stay fixated, pressing the crayon down with almost obsessive effort, trying to register a single point in the performer’s movement, only for the motor to jolt, leaving a jagged, failed line across the paper. Others refuse that fixity entirely, letting their eyes follow loosely, accepting the instability. But all are drawing their perception rather than the thing itself. Every mark in this room is not a record of what is, but of what was; the trace of a body’s having-been-there.

Centrally, a performer moves. She wears feathers arranged across her body — elaborate, asymmetric, slightly excessive — and carries an umbrella whose domestic familiarity sits oddly against the ceremonial gravity of her bearing. The quality of her affect shifts with the room’s population in a way that is not theatrically performed but phenomenologically real. When the gallery is empty, an almost imperceptible irritation crosses her. Not boredom, but something closer to ontological impatience, the frustration of a presence without its necessary counterpart. The nariz empinado remains: that haughty aristocracy of the flesh, that performative ego which insists on its own significance even in vacancy. When people arrive, the energy reorganises entirely: a heightened attention, something almost competitive, the performer suddenly animated, constituted by being seen.

This is Lima's sharpest philosophical claim, embedded not in text or statement but in the live responsiveness of a body in a room: one cannot have a fixed view of whatever is alive. The performer does not need to do anything extraordinary to demonstrate this, she simply continues existing, and existence proves sufficient. What you encounter when you walk in is already not what the person beside you encounters a minute later — not because the space has shifted, but because aliveness continuously exceeds the conditions of its own registration. The performer and the mechanical system operate on separate axes, the biological and the fabricated moving at different speeds, occasionally rhyming and more often diverging. The unfixable gaze is not a theoretical position but an empirical observation: you cannot capture what refuses, by nature, to hold still.

The machines themselves are not above question. Their motors are audibly imperfect, lurching, uneven, occasionally hesitant in a way that reads less as deliberate roughness than actual mechanical effort. The choreography it produces, a movement that is slightly unsure of itself, resists any fantasy of seamless technological elegance. Whether this constitutes a refusal of the AI-smooth aesthetic of contemporary image production, or simply the practical constraints of a mid-scale institutional show, is a question the exhibition cannot quite close. Yet in 2026, a juddering motor is, at minimum, an ethical gesture: a reminder that making things move has always required labour, friction, and the possibility of failure.

Upstairs, nothing resolves. The sound follows loud, uneven, and metallic, climbing the stairs before the body does, as if the building itself has been rewired. To the right, a square room: four soundboxes, one in each corner, each emitting a fragment of the same dissonant, relentless symphony. The sound does not fill the space so much as occupy it, staking out its corners, leaving the centre exposed. And into that centre, a large upside-down red parasol, Parasol Deux, 2023/2026, dances through the space, beginning slowly, robotically, before gradually attempting a looser rhythm, as if learning movement rather than executing it. There is something almost poignant in watching a mechanism with failed aspirations toward grace.

To the left, a separate room operates in deliberate contrast. Its white light is intensified to something closer to clinical exposure than illumination. Yet, cutting against that sterility, a large window faces St James's Park, admitting natural light that seems to have arrived without permission, almost indifferent to the work around it. The two light sources do not reconcile. A large freezer with glass doors stands in this tension like a reliquary misplaced from a supermarket. Inside, the industrial unit contains trays of frozen images, gentle arrangements of objects rather than rigid compositions. A silver necklace. A glass. Few geometric pyramids. A napkin bearing the ghost of a wine stain. Snakeskin. Tiny loose feathers, all furred with frost. Imagens Congeladas [Frozen Images], 1993/2026, is one of Lima's earliest works, and here the image is entirely dependent on its fragile context, on the temperature of the room, and on the care of the viewer.

In front of the freezer stands a table. On it, two pairs of gloves and a text: gloves are available, if you want to use them. Please handle the frozen images with care. The instruction is almost domestic, and yet it reframes everything. To engage with this work is not to look, but to handle, to take responsibility for what the encounter might change. Each frozen image is a relic from a different symbolic order — intimacy, shedding, adornment, ritual — the residue of a life that has already moved on. Together they do not form a collection. They form a mausoleum of the transient: not preservation as triumph, but preservation as the exposure of its own impossibility.

The phenomenological trap Lima sets here is quietly devastating. To look at these objects properly, to press close enough to read the detail, is to bring body heat against the glass. The frost begins to melt. The viewer’s desire to see changes what is seen. The attempt at fixity produces precisely the transformation it sought to prevent. This is not metaphor applied to concept but concept enacted against the viewer’s own body, in real time, without announcement. The logic that runs through the entire exhibition finds its most literal expression here — the more you try to freeze what you have, the more you realise you cannot. To hold an image in fixed form is already to begin changing it.

By the time the closing day’s small, quiet crowd circulates through both levels — no urgency, no celebration, the mechanical clicking still running its anxious count — it becomes clear that The Drawing Drawing is not, in any conventional sense, about drawing. The drawings are the failed residue of an impossible ambition: to register a living subject in stable form. The real subject is the condition of looking itself: partial, embodied, time-bound, always slightly belated. Lima has built an exhibition that refuses to let the viewer step outside that condition and observe it cleanly. One can only observe from inside it, which is to say, one can only observe while already changing what is observed.

The machines work. The performers work. The visitors drawing on those circular platforms work. Perception, here, becomes labour: effortful, interpretive, never conclusive. Everyone in the room is producing their own recreation of what they are seeing, not what it is. Because the moment you stop it, it changes.

The subject is alive; therefore, the image must fail.