The Museum of Antioquia in Medellin on Thursday opened the exhibit of French artist ORLAN, entitled “ORLAN: carnal art or obsolete body.”
For more than forty years, ORLAN has used various artistic mediums to, in the artist’s words, “question the status of the body in terms of politics, religion, society.”
Although she has used various artistic mediums over the years, ORLAN is best known for a series of performance pieces from the 1990s in which the artist showed herself receiving plastic surgery.
Carolina Chacon, assistant curator of the Museum of Antioquia, said one of the purposes of the exhibit was to show ORLAN’s varied collection of work.
“We want to show the different facets of the artist, how she starts with sculpture, how she gets into the dynamics of performance and then surgery,” said Chacon.
The exhibit include a series of large format photos and videos from different operation performances as well as works from the series “Auto-hybridizations” in which the artist used digital photo techniques to blend her face with those of people from ancient cultures.
“You will see a part of my work that began with the pre-Colombian statues, mutant creatures, nomads of the earth. All physical interventions of the past. Civilizations through the ages have tried to make bodies and into what we think,” said ORLAN at the opening.
Viewers can also see videos from her latest project, “The Mantle of the Harlequin,” in which the artist worked with scientists to grow cells of artists from different racial backgrounds.
Pity Ana Jaramillo, director of the Museum of Antioquia, said that the show was very important to Medellin where “the body has been taken as an element that is trivialized.”
This exhibit is ORLAN’s first in Colombia and will run until August 12.
