Anna de Castro Barbosa’s practice explores multi-sensory environments, immersing viewers in haptic images, scent, and visceral materials. Drawing inspiration from horror cinema, botany, medicine, entomology, and archaeology, Barbosa constructs works that challenge bodily perception.

Hypersomnia, 2024, acts as an ode to living matter—its leathery encasing juxtaposed with metal—hinting at the malleability of skin while exploring the potential for metamorphosis. Its organic yet clinical form evokes medical materials, recalling instruments designed for bodily intervention—protective yet invasive.

Speculum XI, 2024, features marbles delicately balanced in a state of precarious equilibrium. The weight and suspension of the marbles reinforce a fragile tension. The contrast between the smooth, cold touch of glass and the sharp, reflective surface of stainless steel (inox) enhances the work's evocative power—where tactility, light, and form intertwine to produce sensations oscillating between comfort and unease. The materials push and pull against each other, intensifying the tension between intimacy and distance, seduction and rejection.

Marissa Delano’s photographic works reveal how layering contexts—such as references to pornography and gender performativity—interrogate societal taboos and voyeuristic impulses underpinning contemporary image culture. Self-Portrait in Bed, Argyle St., 2010/2024, exemplifies this tension, depicting the artist in a vulnerable position that invites viewers but also maintains distance. Her compositions create a visual push and pull—a dynamic interplay of attraction and detachment—encouraging reflection on engagement and the act of looking. Through framing and subtle obfuscation, Delano gestures toward unseen labor and intimacy, blurring private and public spheres.

Her work GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS stacks imagery into an almost anthropomorphic structure, embodying the physical architecture of strip clubs and the layered personas within them.

Together, Barbosa and Delano craft a charged environment where sensuality and discomfort collide. Their works engage the body—both physically and psychologically—exploring the interplay between attraction and resistance, revelation and concealment. At MEGA, audiences are invited into this delicate yet intense terrain, where perception is unsettled, and the familiar is continually reconfigured.