Offsetting the Imaginary: Gather | 2026 and the Fashion Image
Johannes Scott, September 2026
Within the conceptual architecture of Offset, Mareli Lal’s Gather | 2026 operates as a critical hinge—an artwork through which the exhibition’s theoretical stakes become most legible. When read alongside SMAC Gallery’s concurrent exhibition Fashion – The Image Group Presentation, Gather reveals the precise point at which Lal’s practice intervenes in the visual logic of the fashion image, exposing its Imaginary plenitude and symbolic impoverishment.
The photograph presents only the torso of a model: a pink bikini against pink flesh, cropped so that limbs, face, and gesture are absent. This excision is not merely compositional; it is structural. The body is rendered as a surface without subject, a measurable object rather than a symbolic being. In Lacanian terms, the image is saturated by the Imaginary—the register of coherence, proportion, and visual unity—while the Symbolic, the register of language, lack, and subjectivity, is conspicuously absent. The model appears not as a person but as a diagram of flesh, a body reduced to its photogenic coordinates.
This reduction mirrors the logic of Fashion – The Image Group Presentation, where the fashion model is presented as a phenomenologically complete object: fully visible, fully given, fully consumable. Fashion photography, in its classical form, offers the body as a seamless phenomenon, foreclosing the symbolic gap through which desire and subjectivity emerge. It is precisely this foreclosure that Lacan identifies in his critique of phenomenology: the fantasy that the body is simply “there,” available to perception without mediation. Fashion imagery thrives on this fantasy, presenting the model as Imaginary plenitude—an image without fracture, a surface without lack.
Žižek’s notion of the living dead sharpens this critique. In his formulation, the living dead is biologically alive yet symbolically erased, circulating as an object animated only by the demands of the image. The model in Gather exemplifies this condition. She is present as flesh but absent as subject; alive in origin but symbolically dead in representation. Her existence within the artwork is defined not by agency but by measurement, not by desire but by the mechanical insistence of the image. She becomes objet a made literal—the cause of desire flattened into the object of desire, a lure without opacity.
It is at this point that Lal introduces the decisive intervention: a bouquet of cut pink flowers placed over the pelvis. The flowers imitate vitality—growth, bloom, organic life—yet they are severed from their source, already dead, already decorative. They function as a parody of fertility, a parody of erotic charge, a parody of “natural” beauty. In Lacanian terms, the bouquet marks the moment where the Imaginary attempts to impersonate the Symbolic, where surface attempts to masquerade as meaning. The cut flowers are not an addition of life but an intensification of artifice: beauty as pretence, desire as ornament, vitality as simulacrum.
Through this gesture, Gather becomes a critique of the fashion image from within its own aesthetic vocabulary. The work exposes the violence of the fashion image’s Imaginary coherence—the way it saturates the visual field, suppresses lack, and presents the body as a fully given object. By offsetting the image—displacing it, fracturing it, withholding its symbolic coordinates—Lal reopens the space of the Symbolic, returning the viewer to a structure of desire rather than a spectacle of surface.
Seen in dialogue with Fashion – The Image Group Presentation, Gather | 2026 reveals the stakes of Offset as a whole. Lal’s exhibition does not merely appropriate the fashion image; it interrogates its psychic machinery. It demonstrates that the fashion model’s beauty is not neutral but structurally undead: a surface animated by desire yet emptied of subjectivity. In Lal’s hands, the model ceases to be a glamorous object and becomes something else entirely—a site where the Imaginary collapses, where the Symbolic re‑enters, and where the viewer is confronted with the unsettling truth that beauty, in the fashion image, is always already an aftermath.
Source:
Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Johannes Scott received the BA degree in English and Theory of Literature at UNISA in 2011; postgraduate studies in Theory of Drama (2013), Narratology (2014), Critical Theory (2015); with specialisation in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics.
