Corporeality
The invention of photography changed the relationship to the body, and with the advent of film and television, these changes accelerated. Digital images, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence have further increased the flow of new images, displacing materiality and making physical presence less and less meaningful.
All of this not only transformed the perception of corporeality but also created the preconditions for understanding the body as open to change, as demonstrated by the screen bodies of Instagram and YouTube. They set high standards that were difficult to fulfill and became more important than the real bodies - their prototypes, conforming to them in a very conventional way. However, they captured this new understanding of corporeality and the associated gap between reality and representation as an important feature of modernity.
The Art-icon project, “Corporeality,” includes works by artists and photographers from different cultural contexts, ages, and ideas about aesthetics. It shows the diversity of gendered and subcultural readings and visual interpretations of corporeality, the technological perspective, and narrative potential of the human body in the 21st century, and traces the interconnections between contemporary bodily transformations and changing media representations of the body.
Danila Tkachenko, curator