In recent years, a new social trend has flourished—warmly embracing the art of tattooing and recognizing its cultural significance and unique multicultural value. Its status as an independent artistic genre has gradually solidified after centuries of being labeled a “decadent” fringe phenomenon.

Tattooing is an act of transformation, fixation, and transmutation. It enables the commemoration of memory, the revelation of hidden layers, and the expression of cultural belonging—a gesture of permanence in a transient world. The body becomes the medium through which we communicate with the “other” and establish “social networks.”

Tattoo art is inherently linked to rites of passage and initiation rituals in shamanic traditions across non-Western tribal cultures.

This exhibition focuses on the primordial aspect of tattooing, as it emerges both concretely and metaphorically. The participating artists explore, through the lens of tattooing, the ancestral legacies—maternal and paternal—that live within us, continue to shape us, and are reimagined in the contemporary era.