NEVEN presents Feet, a solo exhibition by Young Boy Dancing Group. Since 2014, the performance collective has been staging largely improvised, euphoric live works characterised by intense, genre-defying physical performance that blurs the lines between dance, sculpture, sensuality and absurdity. Their object-based practice, in turn, draws on the distinctive clothing, staging, and physicality of the live performances, standing as relics, remnants, witnesses, and snapshots of past exertion and collective moments. 

Feet expands YBDG’s ongoing investigation into bodies, movement and the politics of display, bringing performance into new sculptural and spatial forms. At the centre are two figurative wooden sculptures, each derived from poses taken directly from YBDG’s repertoire of movement. The works capture bodies mid-action, twisting, lifting, supporting one another, immortalising ephemeral moments of physical exertion, endurance and intimacy in YBDG’s choreography. Rather than monumentalising athleticism in the classical sense, the sculptures reveal instability and precarity: limbs that strain, bodies that slip, muscles that falter and shake, precarious acrobatics on the verge of collapse. They draw from a lineage of athletic sculpture, yet deliberately refuse the purity or heroism of classical works, offering instead imperfect, excessive and fallible bodies. Lit by the same lighting as used for the performances, the sculptures stand on a plinth so large that it takes up most of the gallery, conceived to limit and direct the visitor’s movement in space, marking the visitor as a choreographed participant. The gallery becomes a spatial score: the audience’s steps, hesitations and detours form a parallel choreography that mirrors YBDG’s focus on how dancers respond to constraint, friction, proximity and intimacy. This controlled circulation also foregrounds the theme of the foot as the primary site of contact, direction and desire. Every step is measured as a dancer’s is, which emphasises the politics of weight, pressure, distance and touch. 

Alongside the sculptures is displayed a collection of silver jewellery depicting feet, objects that hover between adornment, relic and fetish. Feet, historically coded as taboo, erotic, abject or humble, become here a site of fascination and knowing play. The collective’s performances have long engaged with states of exposure and excess. The foot becomes a condensation of these forces. From the barefoot rituals of ancient dance to contemporary fetish cultures, the foot is a site of desire, vulnerability and power. As a physical anchor, it carries weight; as an erotic symbol, it destabilises norms; as an artistic subject, it disrupts classical hierarchies of beauty. YBDG positions the foot as the lowest point of the body both literally and culturally, thereby a charged site where the noble and the erotic, the comic and the grotesque, can meet.

Also included in the exhibition are two shoes, of the kind worn by YBDG dancers during performances, each containing small-scale projected performance videos. These hybrid objects function as private stages: tiny cinemas or intimate viewing chambers in which choreography unfolds from the foot. Three further wall-based works see the collective’s distinctively shredded, repurposed and reconfigured outfits fossilised into wall-based works supported by steel frames. They link the material presence of outfitting, a distinctive element of the live work, to the idea of the body’s imprint, its trace, its presence and absence. The shoes in this instance serve as literal vessels of movement, echoing the group’s ongoing interest in how performance persists beyond the live moment.

YBDG’s practice often foregrounds the erotic and physical labour of performance. The foot becomes an emblem of this, the point where the body’s drive, its effort, and its desire converge. Across artwork and spatial design, Feet maps the tensions between elevation and grounding, idealisation and taboo, stillness and movement, presence and absence. The exhibition reimagines classical notions of athleticism and heroism through an absurdist lens: bodies are not perfected but undone; gestures are not triumphant but tender, awkward, persistent. The exhibition extends the core of YBDG’s continual negotiation between control and collapse, intimacy and display into an environment where the visitor becomes implicated. The exhibition choreographs not only performers’ bodies but also the audience’s own feet: the quiet dance of looking, approaching, avoiding, and shifting weight.