September 5–December 5, 2024
Gwangju Media Art Platform (G.MAP) is holding ORLAN Hybrids: A.rtistic I.ntelligence as a special exhibition commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Gwangju Biennale. ORLAN, who uses her body to unceasingly include her artistic narrative, utilizes technology to once again deconstruct, combine, and hybridize physical bodies in virtual spaces through this exhibition. ORLAN, who describes her body as software for using art, powerfully originates several artistic and social voices utilizing transformed virtual bodies. This exhibition seeks to meet with artistic expansion, and its symbiosis, that uses technological media via ORLAN’s art realm, which presents technology’s infinite diversity of genres.
ORLAN (b. 1947) is a woman master representing France. She fortified her identity by rejecting her given name, situated in existing customs and the given tradition, and naming herself ORLAN. With her reborn self’s name of ORLAN, which his neither feminine nor masculine in French, the artist resisted and transformed her naturally given body and pioneered a new genre of body art, which had not existed before.
Notably, the Plastic Surgery Performance Series, consisting of nine installments over three years in cities including New York and Paris in the 1990s, is her representative work. She awakened ethical and artistic discussions on the concept of beauty via live-broadcast surgical performances altering her face and body, and on the resisting body and subjective physicalities through physical mutilation and experimentation, which were taboo, and she radically and sensationally expressed such.
What is noteworthy is that ORLAN’s art is not limited to her physical body. Having expanded her interest to the body’s DNA, she uses bioengineering and anatomy with technology to continue her artistic activities in which her body is once again renamed via technology. Her technologically expanded activities express her with diversified themes. Through this, ORLAN deconstructs symbols of traditionally long-conventionalized images through works subverting dichotomously given social control ideologies, e.g., men and women, the West and the non-West, and nature and humans.
Through this exhibition, Gwangju Media Art Platform (G.MAP) seeks to show that convergence technology is not something engrossed only in the acquiring of new technologies, but a medium ceaselessly seeking to express its art realm and an area symbiosing with art, through ORLAN’s works re-mediating between the body and technology and expanding to various genres.
ORLAN’s body, which has become a hybrid combining everything through technology, transcends space and time to assign complete freedom. Having herself become a window and platform expressing art, ORLAN expresses several themes, including the post-human, gender, and the climate crisis, with the body and technology as the mediums and newly combines everything. These several social issues, which sometimes feel like they lack connecting points, depart from the given social systems’ dichotomous structures and, finely like a checkered pattern, ignite through ORLAN’s body a message of harmony about symbiosis.
The voices of the abyss the works so closely knit seek to project ultimately conclude as one: “I have given my body to art.”
Through this fiery shout and declaration close to a revolution, this exhibition asks us in return. In your life, what are you dedicating yourself to, much like ORLAN in her art and life?
