Bodies, Entwined

Look at a crowd from above and the human body loses its sovereignty. What appeared, at street level, to be a gathering of individuals—each with their own trajectory, their own claim to space—becomes something else entirely: a single, breathing organism. Heads cluster like cells under magnification. Shoulders press into shoulders. The boundaries we spend our lives maintaining—personal space, bodily autonomy, the fiction of separateness—dissolve into a dense topography of collective form. This is where Sera Nadir's camera lives: in the moment when many becomes one, when the body stops being a solitary monument and becomes, instead, part of a larger, living composition.

Her ongoing photographic series, "Bodies, Entwined," has spent the past three years circulating through galleries from Amsterdam's Foam Museum to New York's Aperture Foundation, and recently arrived at London's Saatchi Gallery, where it continues to hold visitors in a state of arrested attention. The work documents bodies in masses—sometimes dozens, sometimes just a handful—gathered so tightly that individual identity gives way to something more primal: the visual language of contact itself. Arms layer over torsos. Legs interlock like the struts of an improvised structure. Fabric—muted seafoam greens, dusty roses, earth tones—drapes and folds between bodies, creating soft valleys and peaks across the human terrain. Shot from above or at dramatic angles, often backlit by golden hour sun or shrouded in atmospheric haze, Nadir's photographs transform crowds into sculptural events.

In one striking image, dozens of people compress into what resembles an underwater scene, bodies floating in a teal-green fog, faces turned away or buried against one another. The lighting is soft, diffused, almost submarine. You cannot tell where one person ends and another begins—there are only curves, masses, the gentle chaos of limbs. Another photograph captures a smaller group in intimate collapse: figures draped across one another like Renaissance paintings of the Pietà, their bodies forming a nest of fabric and flesh, heads bowed, arms cradling unseen weight. The composition is tender, almost devotional.

But it's the vertical images—bodies stacked skyward like human towers—that feel most urgent, most contemporary. Shot from below at dusk, silhouetted against fading light, these formations resemble both monuments and collapses-in-progress. Limbs jut out at impossible angles. Hands reach toward nothing. The structures appear both deliberate and precarious, held together by collective will and the miracle of balance. In one, bodies spiral upward in golden light, each person bracing against the next, creating negative spaces—small windows of sky—between torsos and arms. In another, shot almost entirely in silhouette, the tower of bodies becomes nearly abstract: a dark, organic column against pale sky, punctuated by the distinct shapes of reaching hands and bent knees.

"I'm interested in how bodies read each other," Nadir tells me over tea in her Hackney studio, surrounded by contact sheets and test prints pinned to industrial shelving. Born in Marseille to an Algerian structural engineer and a French choreographer, she studied architecture at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne before abandoning it. "Buildings felt too permanent," she explains. "I wanted to photograph structures that could only exist for a moment—that required breath, trust, and the willingness to bear someone else's weight."

The work emerged unexpectedly. While documenting her mother's contemporary dance company, Nadir became fixated not on individual performers but on the shapes their collective bodies made—the density, the compression, the way ten people could create the visual mass of fifty. She began experimenting with friends, asking them to gather as tightly as possible, to forget social distances and fold into one another. "At first everyone apologized constantly," she recalls. "'Is this okay?' 'Am I too heavy?' But after twenty minutes, something shifted. They stopped thinking about individual comfort and started thinking about the shape they were making together."

What distinguishes Nadir's photographs from traditional crowd documentation or body-focused portraiture is her radical de-emphasis of identity. These aren't portraits of individuals who happen to be touching; they're studies of what the art critic Marcus Sullivan calls "relational mass"—forms that exist only in the plural. You see the back of a head with bleached-white hair pressed against someone in a turquoise shirt. An arm in dusty pink fabric drapes across bare shoulders. The bodies span ages and builds, but Nadir's atmospheric lighting—sometimes hazy and ethereal, sometimes stark and silhouetted—renders them as pure form. A young person's leg might press against an older person's back, but in Nadir's compositions, you see only the meeting of two planes, the way one surface receives and supports another.

Curator Elena Martinez, who organized Nadir's retrospective at the Reina Sofía in Madrid, sees the work as addressing a distinctly contemporary loneliness. "We're more connected than ever through our devices, yet more atomized in physical space," Martinez explains. "Sera's photographs feel almost utopian in their insistence that bodies need each other—that we literally cannot stand alone." The work nods to historical precedents: the tangled figures in Rodin's Gates of Hell, the geometric human formations in Busby Berkeley films, the radical vulnerability of Marina Abramović's durational performances. But it remains urgently of this moment, when our bodies appear online as curated, isolated performances—the selfie, the transformation shot, the personal brand made flesh.

Standing before these images at the Saatchi Gallery, viewers move slowly, leaning close to trace where one body becomes another. The photographs, printed large—some stretching six feet across—demand this kind of patient looking. You find yourself studying points of contact: how a hand grips a shoulder, how fabric bunches between pressed torsos, the small adjustments that allow the entire structure to cohere. There's something archaeological about it, as if examining ancient reliefs documenting forgotten rituals of collective being.

But look longer and the work reveals its tensions. In the vertical tower images, beauty and precarity exist in equal measure. You can sense the strain—the bodies at the bottom bearing impossible weight, the figures at the top balanced on faith alone. These structures cannot hold indefinitely. They exist for the duration of the photograph, maybe minutes longer, then everyone climbs down, stretches, and disperses—separate again, but marked by the memory of having been, however briefly, essential to something they couldn't have built alone.

In an era that tells us to optimize our bodies, protect our boundaries, and perfect our individual brands, Nadir's architecture suggests something we've forgotten: that the most profound thing about having a body isn't its isolation but its porousness, its capacity to shape and be shaped by others. Her photographs capture the beauty not of the body perfected, but of the body in relation—vulnerable, weight-bearing, held.