Works
Illustrations
Writing
CV
Six screen-prints
2024
THE PAIN OF OTHERS is born out of an encounter with a series of photographs found in a 1919 American medical textbook entitled Physical diagnosis by Richard C. Cabot. Each of the anonymous patients portrayed in the images illustrates the symptoms of a specific disease. Illness is the unrivalled subject of these portraits, whilst the individual patients are relegated to the background. Shrouded in an air of objectivity and scientific coolness, these photographs deprive the subjects of their agency and individuality. The images prompt the viewer to adopt an emotional distance from those depicted, prioritising the disease and its study over the human beings, their personal experiences, and suffering.
In this work, the artist removes the images from their medical context and alters them through a printing technique that applies a layer of black paint to the original picture. This creates a visual effect where the underlying figure is intermittently visible depending on the light and the viewer’s distance from the work. From afar, the print may look like a black rectangle, but by approaching the work and looking more closely, the figure is revealed. The work thus consists of a series of portraits in which the phantasmal nature of the original photographs is accentuated and revealed. The subjects – whose names, identities, and lives remain undocumented and thus unknown to us – gaze at the viewer through the darkness. The black layer obscuring the images enacts both the darkness that cloaks the history of the sitters and the ever-elongating layer of time that separates the mo- ment the photographs were taken from the present. Meanwhile, this visual barrier between the viewer and the viewed stages the scientific mystification that shaped the original creation of the images.
The work is a reflection on the ways in which illness has been visualised in Western medicine, on the central role of vision in thinking about the (sick) body, and on the role of images of pain in contemporary media and culture.
* THE PAIN OF OTHERS (2024)
* HOW TO FIND YOU INNER VOICE (2024)
* FOR FANS OF BEAUTY AND FAST HEARTBEATS (2024)
* THAT WHICH IS NEVER SEEN FROM THE EARTH (2023)
* IL MOSTRO NON HA LINGUA (2022)