PACKED FOR PLEASURE
Tom of Finland Foundation presents an exhibition tracing artists who have navigated censorship, obscenity, and the shifting boundaries of what we are permitted to see for nearly a century. Packed for Pleasure is presented with support from Pornhub.
Featuring works by Drake Carr, Violet Chachki, Jean Cocteau, Tom of Finland, Nicolo Gentile, Killion Huang, Mike Kelley & Paul McCarthy, Leigh Ledare, Man Ray, Robert Martin, Bruce Nauman, Emma Stern, and more.
October 1–13, 2026
Opening Reception: October 1, 6–9 PM
Regard, 18 rue Dauphine, 75006 Paris
Free and open to the public
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PARIS, FRANCE — Tom of Finland Foundation presents Packed for Pleasure, a group exhibition featuring images, publications, and archival material that have existed at the edges of what society has permitted us to see for nearly a century. Packed for Pleasure is presented with support from Pornhub.
Curated by Brooke Wise, Chief Curator of Tom of Finland Foundation, the exhibition considers censorship not simply as the removal of an image, but as a force that has shaped how images are made, disguised, distributed, desired, and remembered. Moving between fine art, literature, erotic imagery, publishing, and contemporary digital culture, Packed for Pleasure looks at what happens when desire meets restriction: the codes, disguises, formats, and underground networks artists have used to make, circulate, and preserve images that risked being hidden from view.
The exhibition features historical figures, including Tom of Finland, Jean Cocteau, Bruce Nauman, Mike Kelley & Paul McCarthy and Man Ray, into conversation with contemporary artists, including Leigh Ledare, Drake Carr, Violet Chachki, Killion Huang, Robert Martin, Nicolo Gentile, and Emma Stern. Together, their works collapse distinctions between high and low culture, private fantasy and public image, art object and contraband.
The history embedded within Packed for Pleasure begins long before today’s debates around platforms and deplatforming. Among its archival material is Le Livre blanc, the homoerotic text first published anonymously in Paris in 1928 and later illustrated by Jean Cocteau, alongside material from Physique Pictorial, the influential mid-century publication through which Tom of Finland first reached an American audience. Operating within the constraints of obscenity laws and postal regulations, physique publications adopted the visual codes of bodybuilding and physical culture to circulate images of the male body to an audience that understood what—and who—they were really for.
Rather than place this history behind glass and at a safe distance, Packed for Pleasure reconstructs some of the conditions through which such material was encountered. Part of Regard will be transformed into a darkened, adult-video-store-inspired back room, where CRT monitors, archival books and texts, physique magazines, and printed ephemera form a kind of forbidden reading room. Elsewhere, moving-image work is encountered through a glory-hole viewing structure, making the act of looking itself intimate, private, and slightly illicit.
The installation recalls an era when access required effort: finding the right shop, knowing what to ask for, ordering through the mail, recognizing a coded image, or passing something hand to hand. Against today’s illusion of unlimited digital access, Packed for Pleasure asks a deceptively simple question: Who gets to decide what we are allowed to see?
“Censorship has never made people stop looking, making, or desiring—it has only changed the routes they take to find one another,” says curator Brooke Wise. “I’m interested in everything that grows out of that restriction: codes, euphemisms, pseudonyms, underground networks, things passed hand to hand or arriving wrapped in an unassuming package. There’s a strange creativity born from being told no. Packed for Pleasure brings together artists across generations to look at how desire is pictured, circulated, and made visible—and how the freedom to do so has changed over time.”
The exhibition arrives at a moment when the mechanisms governing visibility have again become increasingly contested. Age-verification legislation, content moderation, algorithmic restrictions, and the deplatforming or demonetization of adult material have introduced new intermediaries between an image and its audience. The technologies have changed; many of the underlying questions surrounding access, obscenity, artistic freedom, and who determines the boundaries of acceptable expression have not.
Pornhub supports Packed for Pleasure as part of an ongoing conversation around creative expression, access, and censorship.
“With censorship increasingly on the rise in the era of age verification laws and social media deplatforming, archives protecting and celebrating erotic art like the Tom of Finland Foundation’s are more important than ever,” says Alex Kekesi, VP of Brand and Community at Pornhub. “Sexual imagination, expression and curiosity are primal parts of the human experience and have also inspired countless works of art over the centuries. While mediums may differ, creators on Pornhub harness this same energy in the work that they publish and monetize on our platform. With shared values of free sexual expression and queer pride, Pornhub is thrilled to be partnering with Tom of Finland Foundation and the esteemed artists part of Packed for Pleasure. Porn and art, as well as the reactions they conjure, act as cultural mirrors—with this presentation and accompanying panel, space is created for timely discussions around sex, censorship and the fight for visibility.”
PROGRAMMING
On October 2, Packed for Pleasure will continue with an invite-only panel discussion at Serpent à Plume in Paris featuring Chloë Cassens, co-producer of Packed for Pleasure and Cocteau historian; Robert Knox Hayes, Chairman of Tom of Finland Foundation; and Alex Kekesi, VP of Brand and Community at Pornhub.
The conversation will examine the shifting boundaries between eroticism, art, obscenity, and censorship—from the coded circulation of queer material in the twentieth century to the increasingly complex systems governing visibility online today.
“I am delighted to highlight the legacies of Tom of Finland and Jean Cocteau alongside a new generation of artists confronting questions of sexuality, censorship, and freedom of expression. Stigmatization of queerness, silencing discussions of sexuality, and attempts to suppress sexual expression are nothing new; only the technologies and apparatus change. Packed for Pleasure brings these histories into conversation with the present, at a moment when questions of who gets to be seen, what can be shown, and who decides feel increasingly urgent. Co-producing the exhibition and moderating this panel is an opportunity to examine those questions across generations, disciplines, and cultural contexts. Liberté, égalité, sexualité,” says Cassens.
The panel and accompanying private event are invitation-only. The exhibition at Regard remains free and open to the public throughout its run.
October 2, 2026 — Time: 9pm-2am with a performance at 10pm
Serpent à Plume, Paris
By invitation only
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
PACKED FOR PLEASURE
Presented by Tom of Finland Foundation
With support from Pornhub
October 1–13, 2026
Opening Reception: October 1, 6–9 PM
Free and open to the public
Galerie Regard
18 rue Dauphine
75006 Paris, France
Regular gallery hours: Open Tuesday to Saturday, 2pm – 7pm
Private Panel & Event
October 2, 2026 — Time: 9pm-2am with a performance at 10pm
Serpent à Plume, Paris
By invitation only
BIOS:
Brooke Wise is a curator and writer based between New York and Los Angeles. She serves as Chief Curator and a member of the Board of Directors at Tom of Finland Foundation 501(c)(3). Her curatorial work spans contemporary art, film, publishing, and public programming, with projects and collaborations including Frieze, NeueHouse, and the New York City MTA. Wise founded Aloha From Hell, a comedy film festival presented in collaboration with Comedy Central benefiting Planned Parenthood, and produced the Fine Art Quarantine Coloring Book, bringing together artists in support of Meals on Wheels and Black Visions Collective. Her exhibitions and projects have been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Vogue, W, i-D, Dazed, GQ, V Magazine, Gay Times, PAPER, Surface, Wallpaper* and 1stDibs. As a writer, she contributes to Playboy and other publications on contemporary art and culture.
Chloë Cassens is the representative of the Severin Wunderman Collection, home to the world’s largest collection of works by Jean Cocteau. As Wunderman’s granddaughter, she brings a unique perspective to Cocteau’s life and legacy. An internationally recognized Cocteau scholar, writer, and lecturer, Cassens has spoken at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the British Film Institute, L’Alliance New York, and other leading cultural institutions. Her work has been featured in Le Monde and The Observer, while The New York Times has described her as “The Little Scorpion of the French Riviera.” She lives between Los Angeles and Paris and her forthcoming book SACRED MONSTER (Hat & Beard Press) will be released in 2027.
Alexzandra Kekesi is VP of Brand and Community at Aylo, the adult entertainment company behind Pornhub and other leading adult platforms. She leads the company’s communications and creative direction with initiatives intersecting culture, art, and tech, while driving Pornhub’s support of the adult community in the fight against sex work discrimination including community outreach and non-profit partnerships. She is a prominent voice on regulatory matters, including age assurance frameworks, and has advocated for solutions that protect minors online while preserving user privacy.
Press inquiries:
brooke@tomoffinland.org