Amrita Dhillon, LSD., at Kürfurstenstrasse 151, Berlin

LSD. by Amrita Dhillon, curated by Luca Loli, at Kürfurstenstrasse 151, Berlin, 10/09/2025 – 27/09/2025.

“Eros is a wound that refuses to heal,” Roland Barthes once wrote.
That sentence kept echoing in our minds as we crossed the anonymous threshold above the infamous sex shop “LSD,” at the corner of Kurfürstenstraße and Potsdamer Straße. Barefoot on a raw concrete floor, we climbed one flight up, and the glossy veneer of commercial pornography gave way to something rougher, murkier, unstable. We asked ourselves, what remains of eroticism when it stops seducing, when it’s no longer a promise of pleasure, but a broken language, out-of-focus flesh, a desire that escapes even itself? In Love Sex Dissonance, desire isn’t celebrated, it’s dismantled.

The exhibition space feels like a repurposed industrial wreck, stripped of ornament, where natural light cuts through the air like a blade and muffled city sounds seep in from the layered histories below. No music, no wall texts, just works murmuring to one another in loaded silences, sometimes intimate, sometimes furious. The layout is anything but linear, we moved hesitantly from piece to piece, often needing to double back, crouch, linger longer than expected. There’s no comforting narrative here, just a constellation of impulses, some carnal, others coolly conceptual, disorienting and seductive all at once.

One of the first images to arrest us is that of a reclining figure, perhaps sleeping, perhaps dead, captured in an ambiguous pose, lips around a black object, maybe a gun, maybe a dildo, maybe something else entirely. The print is faded and hung upside down, nearly spectral, an eroticism that self-erases, offering neither climax nor clear interpretation. Even the texture of the image seems to implode, as though the orgasm had collapsed into echo. Nearby, a gleaming steel sculpture evokes industrial turbines or biomechanical orifices, perfectly machined, chilling in its sterility, like a dehumanized sex toy or a surgical tool for post-organic pleasure. Here, eros has no body left, only friction.

On the floor, a heap of pillows printed with images of semi-nude bodies invites touch, rest, even affection. And yet something’s off, the photographs are pixelated, blurry, misaligned. The body multiplies, fragments, dissolves. You sit down, and you’re not sure if you’re touching someone or no one. It’s pornography made soft, or just another sign that intimacy has flattened into surface. On the walls, small framed works play games with representation, erotic photos fractured and overlaid with decorative motifs, hidden behind optical grids that blur and distort. Looking is never innocent here, we’re voyeurs, but also trapped in a visual code that slips through our fingers. Sex isn’t shown, it’s sabotaged.

Soft materials like fabric and digital print collide with cold, hard, metallic surfaces. The artist’s gesture is never neutral, at times it hides, simulates, or exaggerates. Industrial ready-mades are bent into erotic territory not by adding meaning, but by displacement. An airplane turbine or technical module becomes a phallic totem simply by being removed, neutralized, and charged with tension. Sexuality here is a formal vibration more than a narrative one. Likewise, the digital doesn’t enhance the image, it corrodes it. Pixels act as tools of censorship and fetishism, textures betray the eye. Eros ceases to be iconic and becomes glitch, noise, interference.

In our gut, a weight, the sense of having passed through something irreducible. Love Sex Dissonance doesn’t offer answers or solace. It’s a sensory atlas of fractured desire, one that invites, or perhaps forces, us to reconsider what it even means, today, to be touched. Go. Sit on a body you don’t recognize. Look at what you’d rather not see. And then ask yourself, where did eroticism go, once it stopped feeling good?