Gwangju Biennale 30th anniversary special exhibition ORLAN hybrids: A.…
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Gwangju Media Art Platform (G.MAP) is holding ORLAN Hybrid: 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?
About the Work
Name
ORLANTitle
《The endangered animals and new robots made of recycled objects and materials》series_The endangered polar bear and new robots made from recycled materials and objectsYear
2024Scale
100x140cmMaterial
Digital photo montageDescription of work
In this series, first created withusingartificial intelligence (a current social phenomenon) in the process, the artist reappropriates this tool by reworking the images provided, to take a stand on the disappearance of certain animal species caused by human activity, our waste, deforestation , global warming… It promotes a new generation of responsible technologies through robots made from recycled objects and materials.
In these works, they rebuild what previous technologies have destroyed. This second wave of technology is no longer destructive, but benevolent towards the living world, and takes into account the chain reactions it can provoke in a world we want to preserve/protect. Through her new works, ORLAN hopes that innovation will be fair and responsible, and no longer anthropocentric.
Name
ORLANTitle
《Peking Opera Facial Designs》 series_Peking Opera Facial Designs n° 10Year
2014Scale
150x150 cmMaterial
Digital photo montage, ARDescription of work
Many of my works were attempts to break out of the frame. Both literally and figuratively. With my "Masks of the Beijing Opera, Facing Designs and Augmented Realityseries, I'm stepping outside the frame, outside the work!
At the Beijing Opera, women are not allowed to play themselves. Here, I upset the misogynistic rule of opera by doing acrobatics as a woman!
In the exhibition, you can see these photographic works in which I am hybridized with masks from the Beijing Opera, mimicking myself in the background. A tablet with the Augment application is made available to visitors: if they scan these portraits, theysee me appear as a 3D avatar doing all kinds of acrobatics, juggling the masks, picking them up, taking them off... and anyone who wants can take a photo of themselves with my avatar, thus emerging from the work, and send it around the world like any other selfie!
Name
ORLANTitle
ORLAN's HologramYear
2024Scale
variable sizeMaterial
Hologram device, A.I. computer, audio systemDescription of work
Name
ORLANTitle
《I authorize you to be me, I authorize myself to be you》 series_ORLAN hybridizes with George Sand and perpetuates her wakeYear
2024Scale
130x179cnMaterial
Digital photo montageDescription of work
The artist creates self-hybridizations in homage to women in history whom she admires because they defended causes that ORLAN supports in her life and work. CThe pioneering women who paved the way for other women took risks that sometimes cost them their lives. OftenSotenforgotten, erased or under-represented, ORLAN brings them back into the limelight with this series. The artist, as usual, breaks down the ice walls between artistic practices, genres, eras and skin tones. Her gesture of hybridization with the other allows her to give them an artist’s kiss and create a meeting between women despite the mists of time that separate them. In reference to the great historical portraits, ORLAN prints these artist’s’ digital photomontages on canvas stretched and framed.
Name
ORLANTitle
《Crying Women Are Angry》 series_Self-hybridization between women(act 2: Weeping women are angry n° 3.)Year
2019Scale
102x150cmMaterial
Digital photo montageDescription of work
ORLAN creates very abrupt digital collages in which she inserts fragments of her face: her eyes bulging out, her eyes askew, her ear upside down and her mouth screaming, showing her teeth ready to bite so that anger expresses itself in the work. This is asnapshot of that awareness. ORLAN is not putting Pablo Picasso or Dora Maar on trial, as they can no longer defend themselves, but rather expressing herself to the women of today who remain in the shadows: the inspirers, the models, the muses who played a major role in the fame of our great masters. It’s an incentive to emancipation. ORLAN tells them "stop being objects, become subjects. Emancipate yourselves, stop suffering, stop crying".
Name
ORLANTitle
The Artist's SlowYear
2023Scale
-Material
Sound, CD 20 SongsDescription of work
She realized that many of her assistants had never slow-danced before, and decided that she couldn’t go on like this – she had to do something for young people! With this project, she hopes to help people discover and revive this dance as a therapeutic treatment in this still difficult period of reconstruction.
ORLAN wrote the lyrics for each slow, which she then proposed to musicians to create the melody and sing her texts. She then inserted her voice into the music, in collaboration with the guest.
This album brings together twenty extraordinary slows created by ORLAN in complete osmosis with fantastic artists. : Sir Alice, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Terrenoire, Les Tetines Noires, Les Chicks On Speed, Mimosa, Yael Naim, Tentative, Regis Campo, Myope, Blue Carmen, Les Sans Pattes, La Femme, Romain Brau, Charlie Morrow, Demi Mondaine, Charlemagne Palestine, Kat May Et Iury Lech.
The vinyl is on sale at FNAC and on all platforms. Several clips have been produced to visually illustrate ORLAN’s message: she made "Je suis slowsexuel.le" with Sir Alice and "Les corps de métiers m’excitent" with Tentative. A book will be published with texts written by the artist. ORLAN has performed on several occasions with musicians including Demi Mondaine on Culture Box.
Name
ORLANTitle
Art-Access-Magazine(Minitel)Year
1982-1987Scale
22min 2secMaterial
Single-channel video, Minitel, B&W, silentDescription of work
ORLAN has seized upon it to give it artistic content. So, in 1982, she founded ART-ACCÈS-REVU, an art magazine available on Minitel, co-produced by Frédéric Develay, who was seeking, among other things, to democratize art.
ORLAN invited visual poets, musicians, video artists, literary figures, philosophers and visual artists to create a work (or several works) using the enormous pixels and 8 gradations of gray that made up the Minitel.
These were the best international artists, carefully selected from those working in situ and/or with conceptual issues. Artists capable of fighting with or against constraints, able to divert and circumvent difficulties, and to ask themselves the problems of the medium they invest in.
Two keys are available to help the public better understand the works and artists. Consultants wishing to do so will be able to display two additional pages on their screen, one written by the artist himself, setting out his position and angle of attack, and explaining why he has chosen to respond to the Minitel in this way. Another page given over to a critic chosen by the artist (and not the other way around) will present the artist to the public in clear, non-jargonized terms. Only artists can transgress, adapt, play with and exploit the full potential of this new tool.
The resulting works are often counterpoints (Bernar Venet, Ange Leccia, Vera Molnar, Aldo Spinelli) to the usual videotex, or ironically imitate the services by mischievously slipping into them (Jean-François Bory, Alain Snyers, Jean-Claude Lefèvre).
Every two months, the magazine featured additional works and columns by artists (Ben, Charles Dreyfus, Scarpetta, Sarenco), and took into account questions from the general public, giving answers and the right of reply. ORLAN has organized nights in the company of Buren, Didier Bay, Léa Lublin, Morellet…
For our surprise parties, isn’t it delicious to make love, guilt-free, with Sainte-ORLAN flashing her breast and eyes, a welcome replacement for the saints of Lisieux or elsewhere with their little colored lights, this cold, modern Minitel that can become, depending on the artist, baroque, ironic or kitsch.
Poetry and literature were the Minitel’s tried-and-tested and favorite partners, and a new way of writing/reading was born, a new visual poetry (Frédéric Develay, Sarenco, Jil Wolman).
When it came to music, the Minitel had no sound! Musicians such as Franck Royon Le Mée proposed graphic scores. Musicians such as Gean-Yves Bosseur, Alain Savouret, Martin Davori Jagodic, Pierre Mariétan, Michel Redolfi and Max Neuhaus played on plastic scores or unplayable scores.
On several occasions, ORLAN has shown large-scale installations consisting of stacks of Minitels with the images produced.
This installation was presented by Jean Paul Lyota in the exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou, 1985.
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