ORLAN

Born in 1947 in Saint-Étienne (France)
Lives and works in Paris (France)

ORLAN is one of the most famous French artists internationally known. She creates sculptures, photographs, performances, videos, videogames and augmented reality, using scientific and medical techniques like surgery and biogenetics. Those are only mediums for her; the idea prevails and the materiality pursues. ORLAN makes her own body the medium, the raw material, and the visual support of her work. It takes place as the “public debate.” She is a major figure of body art and of “carnal art,” as she defined it in her 1989 manifesto. Her commitment and her liberty are integral parts of her work. She defends innovative, interrogative and subversive positions in all of her artwork.

On view at KB17 are photographs from ORLAN’s African Self-Hybridatization and Precolumbian Self-Hybridization series. Shelley Rice has written of these series: “The Pre-Columbian Self-Hybridizations (1998) are in color, and mix her face with those carved on ancient sculptures, leaving her skin rough-hewn and stony. The second, African Self- Hybridizations (2000), use nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs (always in black and white) as their models, and superimpose (often extreme) African facial decorations and deformations onto ORLAN’s contemporary European visage. The Self-Hybrdization pictures are, in fact, masquerades: travels in time to distant places, cultural displacements into what Pierre Restany has called ‘a collision of times’. There is, of course, a lineage to these series: in works as diverse as Hannah Hoch's Ethnographic Museum collages from the 1920s and Wangechi Mutu’s fantastic woman-beasts of today, female artists have expressed their fractured and symbiotic relationship with the Other. ORLAN’s Self-Hybridizations are neither anthropolical nor expressive in a surrealist way. They are, instead, arenas for action and inquiry, allowing her to explore the limits of the face, of physical « branding » and expression in a global world where the boundaries of time and culture must by necessity be stretched and redrawn. An extension of her previous work, the Self-Hybridizations mark the ways in which self-presentation forges identity and relationships in an increasingly interconnected world, where people, traditions, and images are continually on the move. Contemporary art has recently caught up with ORLAN, in its dialogs about refugees, displacements, and hybrid identities.”