On Body Horror & the Holy

It is warm outside when I visit the Museum of Moving Image. I am wiping sticky sweat from my chest as I round the corner looking for the exhibition hall that holds Overexposed. An exploration of modern concepts of the body organized by Sonia Epstein. The exhibition hall is massive and I can see, to all sides of me, dancing images calling for my attention. 

I am immediately drawn to Peggy Ahwesh’s City Thermogram – a thermal camera is used to record the ordinary, mundane pieces of life, the clouds, strangers passing by. Each human body is a vibrant red at its core with echoing symphonies of blue, yellow, green. The normal becomes abnormal under Ahwesh’s gaze, what is beneath the surface, what we share with each person, becomes something to behold.

I turn right, into Panteha Abareshi’s Not a Body, where medical bracelets of yellows, reds, blues, flash across the screen detailing the emotional undertaking each medical visit could represent. A weak execution, a barren womb, a piece of memorabilia, a good effort, the bracelets read.

In the center, toward the back of the building I am embraced by Agnes Questionmark’s Opera Medica. Intense walls of images crowd my peripheral vision. The screens are twice my height and as long as the room. A beautiful woman on the screen ahead is dressing, for surgery it seems. Though I am gazing at her as if she may walk down a runway. Her blush color matches the tone of the organs, filled with teeth, a Teratoma to match her rouge. I want to look away but the whole thing is lit like a spread for W Mag. 

I am walking into Courtney Stevens, Mixed Signals and am suddenly fighting back tears. What is it to watch these women, who are fictionalized on the screen in front of me, don personas in order to survive. Are they as free as the deer shown after them, or are the deer, too, trapped inside a narrow path of survival? Are we measured by our output alone? And what of the things we intake?

In Liz Magic Laser’s Mine, a robotic surgeon sticks tiny steel clamps into a purse filled with personal effects. Perhaps it is because I’ve always known an entire world is contained in a handbag, that I long to look away from the screen. I watch. I watch the examination of a life, a life absent from the screen but present in all their belongings. What have they taken, what have they left behind?

My feet begin to ache toward the end of my excursion, the shoes I have worn, impossibly shiny and high are not proving suitable for standing. In awe of the spectacle of the human body, I decide to retreat into a quiet cafe and find a seat. What Epstein offers in her exhibition is a question – where do you draw the line between the holy and the horrific? And – can you trace that line through yourself?

500 words