Greene Naftali: Hanna Hur's Anunciation

     

   To get to Greene Naftali, a hand-operated elevator that almost felt like a relic had to be taken to the eight floor. The current show in the gallery is Hanna Hur's Annunciation, a title that references Antonello da Messina's painting of the same name, the moment Mary learns she will give birth to Jesus.

    Auto Annunciate, an eighty by seventy-six inch acrylic, colored pencil and pigment piece was what caught my eye. Though the title means self announcment, the piece visualizes the opposite, it holds back what it seems to promise. Only after a few minutes of taking in the repeating pattern of squares and dots does the viewer notice the hands followed by an outline of a female figure in the center. Her hands reaching outwards gives this sense of her trying to communicate with the viewer. Small shifts of color keep the pattern from making it feel flat and monotonous.

    Annunciation, a small colored pencil drawing on a piece of paper reminded me of the times I would draw out the squares in my notebook when I went to middle school. Because it was on paper rather than a canvas, the lines felt thinner and more fragile which also created the sense of this piece sitting somewhere between abstract and figurative but not fully being either one. This exhibition asks people to slow down and look for once.

Dunya Oguz

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

De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022)

Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor

by Cass Brent-Nurse

Warning: Images of explicit medical procedures featured below.

Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body, presents the viewer with an almost overwhelming portrait of the human body and the technological ways we perceive it. When visitors first enter the exhibition, they are greeted by well-known, even quaint depictions of technology-focused images of the body, like early X-rays and animations.

As the exhibition progresses, however, the works complicate and even reshape the view of the body as it relates to technological advancements, and especially the field of medicine, giving the viewer an often unseen perspective of the inner workings of the body. In De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), directors Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor present an in-depth and often close-to-obscene six-channel video of the human body through the medical lens, combining images of highly invasive surgical procedures of bloodied body cavities with footage of medical staff who perform this work as they comment flippantly on the severity of their patients’ conditions or blow off steam at a disco club after work. Unnervingly, the film emotionally binds viewers to these medical personnel while simultaneously distancing them from the patients, who are intimately presented as bodies split open on an operating table rather than individuals. This dehumanizing perspective places the viewer on the same side as the medical staff, severing the body from the being to view it through a sterile medical lens.

This exhibition forces the viewer to reconsider their body and challenges the technologically advanced world that allows them to bypass the corporeal in favor of the intangible and digital.