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.
I really liked your point that the film binds us to the medical staff while keeping the patients at a distance. It's the heart of the review. I appreciated that you grounded it in the flippant comments and the club scene. What I wondered is how the film makes that bond happen. Is it the editing, the sound, the way the camera lingers, etc. on the staff? A sentence on that could make the reading even stronger. I'm also curious whether the club scene complicates the alignment by making the staff more human. And since the show is called Overexposed, how do the cameras themselves fit in?
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