Museum of the Moving Image: “Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body”

 

By Miles Westrich

Etienne-Jules Marey’s Selected Chronophotographic Films (1891-1900) greet viewers at the entrance of “Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body”, an exhibition currently on display at the Museum of the Moving Image. The French physiologist’s work documents how the development of late 19th-century motion recording technology was used by scientists and artists to expand our vision and understanding of the body. Through a unique curation of artists and artworks, this show walks viewers through the dynamic relationship between medical science and the arts. In Barbara Hammer's piece Sanctus (1990), the artist uses innovative filmmaking techniques to edit and manipulate James Sibley Watson Jr.’s X-ray archives. Thus, she comments on the health implications of X-ray technology via her artistic practice. 

The three-channel video installation Opera Medica (2025) by Agnes Questionmark showcases the artist as a doctor performing surgery on an alien-like transhuman figure, reflecting her personal experience with gender-corrective surgery. The theatricalized performance acts as a vehicle for regaining agency as a patient and explores themes of liberation from the medical system. Investigating diverse and adversarial experiences with healthcare is a key throughline among many works in this show. By drawing on the multifaceted histories of Western medicine, a wide range of archival material and self-critical contemporary artwork resonates with said subject matter. This led to the show being over-curated at times, with back-to-back installations crowding the exhibition space. Despite this oversaturation in quantity, the collection’s quality was strong, with each artwork contributing significant insight on the thesis of the exhibition.

Justine Kurland: A Retrospective

Justine Kurland: A Retrospective at OSMOS reads the female body through a queer feminist lens. Through various photographs from her Of Woman Born (2005–2007) series, this lens comes through as direct and sharp. The series features nude mothers and infants staged in the wilds of the American West. The title comes from Adrienne Rich's 1976 book, which frames motherhood as an institution that binds women to domestic service. Kurland adds a question of her own. Would we still exploit the earth if we imagined it as a father rather than a mother?

Sister of the Light (2006)

Wahclella Falls (2006)

One memorable print, Sister of the Light (2006), holds the soft, damp light of a casual morning in the woods. Several mothers and their children gather close, and sunlight filters through the trees onto their bare skin. The group seems less like a family portrait than a small, self-sufficient community. In Wahclella Falls (2006), mothers breastfeed their children beneath a waterfall. The spray falls around them as freely as the milk they give.

The photographs create a world built on matriarchal terms. Here the breast is neither erotic nor shameful. It is as ordinary as water moving through a stream. Kurland suggests the body only takes on meaning once society looks at it and judges it.

The show's strength is its refusal to apologize for pleasure, rest, or nakedness. Yet the work leans on the same "mother earth" myth it claims to test. Kurland's Eden is beautiful, but escaping society is not the same as changing it. 

Xinlei Lin

Lynda Benglis - Knotting, Tying, Folding

Lynda Benglis' Knotted, Tying, Folding explores what's possible of material through the process of folding, twisting, tying, and stretching. Benglis' exhibition challenges conventional ideas of sculpture, transforming hard materials into soft, flowing, organic forms. Her works focus on movement and physical transformation, as well as the relationship between material and motion, rather than fixed or controlled forms.

Metal is one of the most surprising materials Benglis uses in the exhibition. The smooth metal sculpture looks fluid and irregular, as if it has been bent or touched by hand. What makes the sculpture interesting is the contrast between the hardness of the metal and the softness implied by the form. The reflective surface also moves in relation to its surroundings, resulting in a piece that responds to light and the viewer's movement throughout the gallery.

The black sculptural forms that highlight the floor are another example of Benglis' approach to repetition and form. The repetition in the work creates a rhythm and requires the viewer to see each object as both an individual and a part of a larger composition.

Knotted, Tying, Folding  demonstrates how sculpture can imply movement without actually representing it. Benglis' physical language of making opens up new possibilities for sculpture, and her materials become tactile and expressive in seemingly spontaneous ways.

Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body at the Museum of the Moving Image

Museum of the Moving Image - Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body

by Can Bartu Catal

Barbara Hammer, “Sanctus,” 1990. 16mm film transferred to HD video. (Courtesy the artist’s estate and Electronic Arts Intermix)

Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body at the Museum of the Moving Image captures the complexity of the relationship between technology and the human body. The exhibition is a journey of overlapping section that explore how film and X-ray technologies shaped Western claims to scientific objectivity, how artist interact with found footage and investigate their own bodies to expose and challenge the normative assumptions embedded in medical imagery, and how imaging tools have transformed practices of care with works ranging from 1891 to 2025.

  

One of the exhibition’s most interesting explorations is showcasing how X-rays moved beyond medicine and became exposed to popular culture and how it impacted it. In these two pieces, Naked Truth (1899) and X-ray Spex (2022, produced in 1964), we see how women were among the feel the threat of the X-ray gaze, about how and invention like the X-ray was used in media to immediately single out women's bodies for the "de-facto male gaze". It speaks to how, in popular culture the X-ray was marketed to men for centuries to reveal nakedness, to see beneath clothing and such, yet in reality, X-ray images do the opposite, obscuring gender markers. It makes you take a step back, makes the familiar act of looking at the human body feel strange again and shows how images of the body are not completely neutral and how they're shaped by technology, the culture, and whoever is doing the looking.

Georgia Chalk - Frank Gillette Spectra Obscura at Microscope Gallery

The Frank Gillette show, Spectra Obscura, at Microscope Gallery offered a unique perspective on nature, degradation, and technology but many of my thoughts as I moved through the space were strangely unimpressed. It was not until I sat and ruminated on the works that a more complete opinion was formed: one entirely different from the first impression. Although I was not particularly interested in the concept of the photos and videos, the sequencing of the images was visually compelling with the kaleidoscopic section moving to the mirrors placed in natural settings to the settings themselves create a story. Specifically when the rocks were thrown into the mirrors (slowly contributing to their destruction) felt like a movement from the abstracted image to the overlaid videos of the trees.

    

The video-works (The Symbiotic Blues specifically) were mesmerizing, having a deeply meditative/mesmerizing feeling to them. It may have been the time-nature subject, but there was a slight scientific atmosphere surrounding the works, especially when considering their presentation and climate conscious messages. There was a similar effect in the photographs where the assemblages of found nature objects left you wondering what you were looking at until the moment the eye registers something familiar. It was intriguing as well to see how he created these effects with and without technology, both video and photograph effectively functioning as collages. In retrospect, it may have been the space that interrupted the flow of the works’ ability to really interact with each other wholly, subsequently the viewer - work relationship. 

Lucy Jang - The Museum of Moving Image - Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body

The Current Season 26/FA-HAD-472-02

The Museum of Moving Image, Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body

by Lucy Jang

Image from : MOMI, instagram page

The Overexposed exhibition explores the connection between medical technology and the ways human bodies are seen and understood. Through developments such as X-rays and MRI scans, we are able to see parts of the body that cannot normally be observed by the human eye. However, throughout the exhibition, I began to question whether seeing more doesn't always mean understanding more. I felt curious looking at these normally hidden parts of the body, but at the same time, looking so deeply into someone felt strangely invasive, almost as if I were entering something private.

This is shown in Agnes Questionmark Opera Medica (2025), a three channel video installation that surrounds the viewer with detailed footage of a medical procedure and the artist’s personal experience of gender-affirming surgery. The work made me think about who has control over the body when it is being examined or undergoing a medical procedure. Similarly, Barbara Hammer’s Sanctus (1990) uses X-ray footage to reveal the body from the inside, transforming medical images into something we observe outside of their original medical purpose. Both works show how technology can make the invisible body visible, while also raising questions about privacy and exposure. They made me wonder whether such detailed inspection allows us to understand the body more deeply or instead turns something personal and private into something exposed and observable.

From the Air by Yvonne Jacquette

 Yvonne Jacquette's exhibition "From the Air" at Karma brings together her paintings and works on paper created between 1971 and 2016. After a cross-country flight in 1969, Jacquette began to explore aerial perspectives. Later, she observed urban and natural landscapes from airplanes, helicopters, and high-rise buildings. She did not aim to replicate these scenes exactly like maps or photographs. Instead, she combined direct observation, memory, and imagination. During this process, distance became both the subject of her work and a way for her to understand the world below.

"Airplane Window, Clouds and Hills" is a watercolor on paper created around 1976. The rounded rectangular format resembles an airplane window. The image is filled with clouds, sky, and distant mountains. The landscape extends to the edges of the painted area, and there is almost no visible unpainted space within the image, so the viewer does not feel a boundary between themselves and the scene. This composition creates a first-person point of view. The viewer seems to be sitting by the airplane window, looking out during the flight. This work shows how Jacquette connects physical distance with personal experience through the shape of the picture.

"N.Y. Aerial View from Helicopter (Looking East from Hudson Yards Area) II" depicts Manhattan during the day. Jacquette compresses many buildings into a wide canvas composed of brown, blue, orange, and yellow brushstrokes. She changes the perspective and scale, and did not depict the city as an accurate map. The city can still be recognized, but the repeated shapes also form an abstract pattern. As an international student, I recognized a tension between distance and belonging in these works. This exhibition shows that although an aerial perspective may seem detached, it can still contain the traces of daily life.