Pervertible Series

For Unerhört: Sex as Artistic Practice at Kunstverein Leipzig (December 3, 2025 – January 31, 2026), I presented Pervertibles, Tubes, Out, a sculptural series investigating pleasure as misdirection, infrastructure, and rerouted desire.

The works began with the concept of the pervertible: an everyday object intentionally misused for the purpose of pleasure. Rather than inventing new erotic forms, the pervertible proposes a subtle shift—what happens when an object’s prescribed function is interrupted and redirected toward sensation, fantasy, or intimacy?

Across the series, I became increasingly interested in how customized pleasure devices do more than stimulate; they reorganize attention. They narrow vision, alter posture, isolate surfaces, and create temporary architectures of longing. In doing so, they expose the systems—material and institutional—that support desire.

Pervertible No. 1 — The Walking Glory Hole

Expanding upon my ongoing hole studies, Pervertible No. 1 is a mobile viewing device mounted on wheels. The apparatus constrains vision through a narrow looking tunnel, effectively transforming any chosen surface into a glory hole.

The viewer becomes both hunter and carrier. The device can be pushed, repositioned, and aimed—turning public space into a field of potential encounter. By restricting sight, the sculpture intensifies focus; the world is reframed through a single aperture.

Inside the structure, a concealed inner tube contains a hidden pair of underwear housed within a secret compartment. Initially imbued with my scent, the garment was later replaced with another’s over the course of the exhibition. This quiet substitution shifted authorship and intimacy, transforming the object into a circulating vessel of embodied trace.

Pervertible No. 2 — The Perpetual Drip

Pervertible No. 2 is installed directly beneath an exposed tube chamber, revealing the infrastructural systems that make the exhibition space operational. Attached to the wall, the sculpture positions itself within the building’s visible circulation network—pipes, ducts, and hidden channels that sustain the institution.

This work stages a “perpetual drip,” invoking both leakage and continuity. Rather than conceal the structural supports of the exhibition, the piece aligns itself with them, suggesting that desire, like plumbing, relies on circulation, pressure, and containment.

By situating erotic misdirection alongside institutional infrastructure, the work asks:
What carries pleasure?
What channels it?
What systems make its display possible?

A hybrid fetish magazine and art book collecting the work of 20 contributors across performance, photography, and theory who are all working with and alongside holes. Creator and Editor: Cy X Cover Design: Joseph Lanzinger

A hybrid fetish magazine and art book collecting the work of 20 contributors across performance, photography, and theory who are all working with and alongside holes.

Creator and Editor: Cy X
Cover Design: Joseph Lanzinger