Ecstasy Protocol

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present Ecstasy Protocol, a two-person exhibition featuring the works of artists DewKim and Filippo Cegani. In Ecstasy Protocol, the two artists delve into the fractured afterlife of Christian iconography in the post-digital age. Far from nostalgia or shock for its own sake, the exhibition interrogates what endures of a once-dominant visual and moral language—now commodified, destabilized, yet eerily persistent. In a cultural landscape where sacred imagery is more likely to surface as an emoji, meme, or K-Pop stage design than in a church or chapel, Kim and Cegani trace the migration of the divine into the digital unconscious. They ask: “What becomes of symbols when martyrdom, grace, sacrifice, and ecstasy are stripped of their spiritual grounding and repurposed within the spectacle economy of late capitalism?” Filippo Cegani’s paintings reframe classical religious figures in high-gloss, hyperreal surfaces, created through layered brushwork and airbrush. Saints and martyrs appear not as objects of veneration, but as sites of inquiry—diagnostic portraits that expose how sincerity becomes aesthetic, and the sacred becomes stylized.Blending Renaissance forms with digital artifacts, Cegani probes the erosion of sanctity through replication, reproduction, and meme logic. His work lingers in the space between the devotional and the disposable, where masculinity, vulnerability, and identity flicker in flesh and illusion. Dew Kim approaches similar questions through sculpture, performance, and installation—rooted in queer experience, Christian rituals, and the aesthetics of transgression. His materials—iron, silicone, jesmonite—evoke both reliquary and restraint. In Kim’s world, the martyrium becomes a site of erotic defiance: submission not as surrender, but as authorship. Religious symbols morph into queer totems, merging pain with pleasure, devotion with desire. The altar becomes a stage, the body a medium through which belief is both reclaimed and rewritten. At the heart of Kim’s work is a question of permission: who is allowed to feel ecstasy—and under what terms?Through ritual and spectacle, his sculptures assert that the sacred is not lost, but rerouted—channeled throughperformance, kink, fandom, and digital mediation. Together, Kim and Cegani present a haunting vision of how contemporary visual culture metabolizes religious legacy. Today, ecstasy, pain, and sacrifice are not suppressed—they are everywhere, repackaged as content, drifting across screens, drained of context. Ecstasy Protocol doesn’t ask for reverence but demands a reckoning.Through their distinct yet intersecting practices, Kim and Cegani peel back the gloss of the digital present to reveal what still pulses beneath: longing, myth, ritual, and the enduring human need to make meaning from suffering—and from joy. Dew Kim (b. 1985, Seoul, South Korea ) received his MA in Sculpture from RoyalCollege of Art, London, UK and BFA in Metal smithing and Jewelry from Konkuk University, South Korea. Kim’s artistic practice is built on exploring various intersections of art, religion, and identity that lie in the critical point of change and collision. He mainly works with video art and installations that explore issues of sexuality, queerness, feminism, sadomasochism, pop culture, religion, mysticism, and the body as forms of knowledge and research. By using the process of destruction, in masochistic terms –which are both pain and pleasure– he focuses on how chastity training in the BDSM community allows the practitioners to transport and expand sexual desires by renouncing genital arousal and eroticizing the anus. This leads to a deconstruction of the signified body and creates a new language of sexuality that is beyond the phallocentric order.Kim has held solo exhibitions at Various Small Fires, Seoul; Fragment Gallery,Moscow; and out_sight, Seoul. The artist has been in group exhibitions at Documenta 15, Kassel; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul;Barbican Centre, Camden Arts Centre and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Ilmin Museum of Art, N/A, and Alternative Space Loop, Seoul; Daegu Art Museum;Buenos Aires Biennial; Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary, Trevi; Para Site, Hong Kong;Grey Projects, Singapore; Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin and more Filippo A. L. Cegani, (b. 1993 ,Milan, Italy ) is currently living and working in Milan after spending a decade in the UK. During his stay in the UK, Cegani studied at Camberwell U. A. L., where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in 2019 and continued to work with multiple galleries internationally. Cegani’s practice initially started with a post-digital approach in his paintings and has now developed into merging classical and contemporary aesthetics in his compositions. The artist has held solo exhibitions the past years with Enari Gallery, Amsterdam, Grove Gallery, London, Daniel Benjamin Gallery, London, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions worldwide.

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