Project Description:
This is an exhibit that looks at how contemporary artists take a scientific approach to the examination of the human body. Featured artists might include: Featured artists: Tony Oursler, Wim Delvoye, Damian Hirst, Rosemary Laing, Thomas Ruff, Mariko Mori, Patricia Piccinini, Stelarc, Eduardo Kac, Boris Mikhajlov, Orlan, Peter Witkin, Matthew Barney, Dragan Živadinov, Oleg Kulik, Daniele Buetti, Berlunde de Bruyckere, Ron Mueck... At the time when at lunch we can have a rather competent conversation on genetics and alterations of living organisms and their characteristics, and when we can read about the genome in popular magazines, along with lifestyles of celebrities and the world of business and fashion, we should inquire about the limits of our body. Has it really reached its maximum so that it needs a redesign or is the image of it getting worn out just a question of the global market and sales strategies of some branches of economy, which are able to turn everything, including human body, into a marketing motive that brings significant profits? For some branches of medicine and pharmacy, concerned with the pathology of human body, but also its development, human body is the principal medium for economic growth. Technological revolutions of the past century have initiated the change of perception both of the body format and its function. Digital revolutions have changed, or better to say intermingled the notions of the real and the virtual, so that artificial seems to us more perfect than natural. To what extent has human body today, its physical properties which still resemble that of primates, changed under strong influence of sophisticated medicine and the simulacrum technology of human body? To what extent has the body actually become superfluous and expendable in the world of images proliferated by mass media, for example consequences of war and combat, natural catastrophes and accidents? The exhibition Obsolete Body / New Body is devoted to the topics of the old, worn out, and new, established as a principle, which is actually a result of complex civilisation changes and the phenomenon of progress. It seems that the classic notion of the harmony of mind and body and the selfness of existing in the centre of the world, as established by the Renaissance, which asserts that the world is exactly so as we see it, is systematically vanishing from our minds. In what way is this phenomenon of changes manifested in the world of art discourse, but also vice versa, can be sufficiently illustrated by the fact of rapid increase in the number of artists concerned with the topic of human body (but also the body of other living species and nature as such), which opens a space for new insights emerging from the contact or divergence between art and science, i.e. high technology and primary natural elements and laws. This exhibition encompasses paradigmatic, very representative art poetics of artists who have become internationally well-known and recognised precisely for this specific discourse, the thematization of essentiality and sense of human body.

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