KINGS presents REJECTED, a group exhibition hosted at Banquet, on view from December 16, 2025 to February 7, 2026.

REJECTED emerges from a contemporary paradox: immersion in erotic imagery is encouraged by social media platforms rather than suppressed. Desire, therefore, exists in a contradictory condition—simultaneously monitored and actively stimulated by the very platforms that regulate it.
Many of the works on view have been censored across different platforms; others were altered or “covered” with graphic elements in order to be published. This form of aesthetic self-censorship, seemingly harmless, reveals a far more insidious mechanism of control: desire is tolerated only when rendered inoffensive, sanitized, and disciplined. In a world where everything is filtered, tenderness and modesty become forms of resistance as powerful as provocation. For this reason, REJECTED does not oppose love to obscenity; instead, it places them on the same plane, as two distinct ways of articulating the need to be seen and touched.
Digital platforms do not merely eliminate content; they correct, conceal, soften, remove, and ban it. Images are accepted only once stripped of their truth, while within the same digital space violence, hatred, and genuinely harmful content circulate freely. This mechanism exposes a profound cultural contradiction: the naked human body—long central to the history of art—continues to be treated as a taboo to be hidden, while brutality gains visibility and legitimacy.
The exhibition brings together a group of Italian artists (among many others who could be included) who explore the languages of eroticism and pornography, ranging from soft to trash, and at times becoming deliberately raw and vulgar. Their practices span photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, audio, and video. REJECTED creates a dialogue between emerging voices and artists already established within the contemporary art landscape, giving space to different generations and visual languages.
KINGS situates the works within an apparently chaotic installation, deliberately setting aside the possibility of an in-depth focus on the monumental output of each individual artist.
A nearly physical persistence drives these artists to return repeatedly to the same images, to work for months on a single detail, and to continually redefine a gesture, a pose, a surface of skin. This obsession does not stem from a desire to please or to shock, but from the necessity of fully understanding what they are attempting to reveal. Through daily confrontation with their own visual imaginaries, artists measure the boundary between what can be said and what insists on emerging, even at the risk of rejection.
REJECTED is not provocation for its own sake, but a clear position: when art is censored while degradation remains visible, censorship does not protect society—it suppresses critical thought. Restoring dignity to the body means freeing it from the moral blackmail of erasure and reaffirming its role as a universal language, a site of freedom, and a space for cultural exchange.