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.