“Gym, Let’s Work it Out” is a group exhibition exploring how masculinity is forged in contemporary societies. Taking the gym as a mise-en-scene it presents contemporary art by emerging artists whose work engages the male body in relation to various apparatuses that are used to mould it – be they mechanical or political. Pushed outside of its natural state, this exhibition puts forward the masculine as equally aspirational and grotesque, engendering psychological notions of success, competition and power in normative societies that are increasingly open to question. The gym is a metaphor for the social spaces in which these ideologies are shaped, one that is as erotic and queer as it is utilitarian and conservative.

Kit Hammonds (b. 1975, UK) is as curator, writer, artist and lecturer currently based in Taipei. Hammonds was a curator of the CAFA Museum Biennial and Red Lines/Blue Threads, Serralves Museum, both 2014; and Balance Sheets, Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong, 2015. He was a founder and director of Publish and be Damned, London (2004-2014) and Index Art Book Fair, Mexico (2014-present). He was a curator at the South London Gallery 2003-2007; Acting Director of The Showroom, London, 2010-2011; and Senior Tutor in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London, 2007-2015. He is the co-curator of The Editorial as part of the Taipei Biennale 2016 and has been Guest Professor in the MA Critical and Curatorial Studies in Contemporary Art at the National Taipei University of Education School of Arts and Design.