What is the Limit? is an ongoing series of photoconstructions begun in 2021, in which the mouth, a fragment of the body stripped of biography, becomes the site of a fundamental question: what can a body endure?
Working through self-portrait and photoperformance, Gabi Coêlho places objects foreign to the body inside or against the mouth: barbed wire, fish hooks, scissors, hair, and a chicken heart.
These are not metaphors decorating a concept. They are materials that demand presence, from the body that holds them and from the eye that cannot look away.
By isolating the mouth from any identifying context, she removes from the viewer the familiar tools of classification. There is no face to read, no identity to assign, no narrative to resolve. What remains is the image itself: a threshold between the tolerable and the unbearable, held open with precision and without apology.
The fragment becomes a method. A mouth without a biography suspends certainty. It forces a different kind of attention, one that cannot rely on recognition or projection, and must instead confront its own discomfort. The viewer is not invited to observe; the viewer is implicated.
The series does not seek to shock. It seeks friction, the specific friction that occurs between a body pushed to its limits and another body watching. What happens in that space drives the work: not the object, not the gesture, but the encounter between image and presence.
She places herself simultaneously as subject and object of the work, following a lineage of artists who used the body as a field of political and poetic inscription: Ana Mendieta, Ana Maria Maiolino, and Letícia Parente. Like them, she refuses the body as a passive surface. In What is the Limit?, the body is the site of the question, and the question does not resolve.
The series is currently ongoing and comprises fifteen images in variable dimensions. Part of the work has been acquired by the Centro Cultural Banco do Nordeste do Brasil (CCBNB) collection and a private collection in New York.
About Gabi Coêlho
Gabi Coêlho [Maceió, AL, Brazil, 1987] is a visual artist working with photoconstruction, self-portrait, and photoperformance. Her practice centers on the body as a field of tension between limits, vulnerability, and connection, a territory where what is endured and what breaks apart coexist within the same image.
In 2018, she turned to performative self-portraiture as the language through which her visual research found both form and urgency. Since then, she has developed series that move between the extreme intimacy of the body fragment and the broader territory of human relations.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Festival Amalgama at Museo Toluca in Mexico, FestFoto São Paulo at Unibes Cultural, the Nordeste Expandido touring exhibition across six Brazilian states, Incorpografia at Galeria Álvaro Santos in Aracaju, and Afetos Plurais at Funarte in Belo Horizonte. Her photographs have been published in Transe Magazine (Mexico), Dodho Magazine (Spain), Revista Ampolleta Roja (Chile), and Revista Pausa na Rede (Brazil).
Her work is held in the collection of the Centro Cultural Banco do Nordeste do Brasil (CCBNB) and in private collections in France and New York. [Official Website]
