4th Floor, west wing, MuseuMAfricA
10 July – 10 August 2000
In the latter half of the twentieth century, two popular cultural icons dominated the media landscape: firstly the image of the atomic bomb's mushroom cloud expressed all our anxieties about science unleashing uncontrolled and uncontrollable natural forces through the early part of the cold war; secondly the image of the earth from space defined our reaching outwards, our use of science and technology to extend the boundaries of our experience infinitely. Both icons set the body at the centre of their scientific and technological endeavours: the atom bomb turns our microscopic constituent elements into a cataclysm, and space exploration sets us as microscopic elements in a vast universe. Both reflect the relation of outside to inside, and the anxieties and spatiotemporal arrangements that accompany such anxieties, along a scientific and technological trajectory that oscillates from infinitesimal to infinite.
This atrocity exhibition seeks to situate the body within this trajectory as a function of and as a catalyst to shifts along it. Central to shifts in the technoscientific project of the last fifty years have been a shift in the situation of the body within technological systems, first as a symptom, a pathology to be accounted for and cured, in the ergonomic and medical models, and then a core constituent element for technological systems to organise themselves around, in the leisure and information models. Central to both is an understanding of the body as both a public and private space, two radically different spaces. It is medico-scientific technologies, especially imaging and probing technologies, which have been most consistent in trying to unravel the mystery of the relation between the body, its atomized elements and interior surfaces, and its wider technological contexts. The exhibition displays the body in pathological modes, in sickness, mutilation, pain and death, as well as demonstrating the normalizing attempts of technoscientific systems to present and understand the body's elements within wider spatiotemporal arrangements.
James Sey & Kathryn Smith
Curators
James Sey
James Sey has researched questions around technology and the body for a number of years, and has numerous academic and popular publications on the theme. In 1997 he directed, wrote and appeared in a series of multimedia live performances, with the group the Sunless Ensemble, dramatising the pathological aspects of the relationship. After many years of academic teaching and research he now works as editorial director for a media and marketing company, teaching part-time in the Wits Graduate School for the Humanities, as well as the Wits School of Music, where he has taught for seven years. He is currently interested in spatiotemporal constraints on the body in a converged global economy, a topic on which he will present at the academic forum of Urban Futures.
Kathryn Smith
Kathryn Smith is a Johannesburg-based artist, critic and curator who had a hard time choosing between the Fine Arts and forensic pathology as potential career options. She graduated MA(FA) from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1999. Her visual arts practice centres around lens-based media and the violence of photographic rhetoric, focusing on the traumatised body which is present even in its absence. She is the Gauteng editor of www.artthrob.co.za – contemporary south african art, a regular contributor to the Mail & Guardian, co-facilitates Artichoke, and consults at the Adler Museum of Medicine.
This exhibition is made possible by Teljoy, The Adler Museum of Medicine, The Wellcome Trust, The Johannesburg Art Gallery, Department of Anatomical Sciences (Wits), Department of Orthodontics (Wits), Department of Linguistics (Wits), and the Forensic Science Laboratory, Pretoria.