SESSION: Transparent Flesh: Reimagining the Medical Image in Contemporary Art

This session investigates how contemporary art engages with the visual regimes of medical imaging to question dominant narratives of bodily transparency, objectivity, and control. From X-rays and MRIs to 3D scans and AI-generated diagnostics, the medical image has come to signify a form of truth about the body—an interior visibility that supposedly bypasses subjectivity. Yet these images, often stripped of personhood, sensation, and context, also produce a visual abstraction of the self: a “transparent flesh” that is both hyper-visible and disembodied, clinically legible yet phenomenologically opaque.

Artists working across photography, installation, performance, and digital media have increasingly responded to this paradox, reclaiming the space of medical representation as one of critique, fiction, and resistance. Through reappropriation, distortion, layering, or juxtaposition with affective material, such practices foreground the lived body as unstable, fragmentary, or wounded, challenging the supposed neutrality of medical imagery and its embedded epistemologies. These works raise pressing questions: How is the medical gaze racialized, gendered, or ableist? How can artistic interventions subvert the logics of surveillance, normalisation, and extraction? And what kinds of visibility—and invisibility—do they offer in return?

This session invites papers that explore these intersections, whether through historical case studies, critical theory, curatorial projects, or practice-based research. Topics might include the aesthetics of the scan, the politics of bodily data, the phenomenology of being imaged, or the ethics of representing illness and trauma. We particularly welcome contributions that engage feminist, queer, crip, and posthuman perspectives to reframe how bodies are seen, imagined, and contested.

This half-day session will feature artistic works and theoretical presentations. This structure is designed to foster focused, in-depth engagement with each contribution and to allow for meaningful dialogue between presenters and the audience.

Session Convenors:

Jessica Ragazzini, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Université de Strasbourg,

Session Speakers:

Savannah Tew, University of Florida, first-year PhD student, Department of Art History

Community Knowledge and Zoe Leonard’s Wax Anatomical Models in the U.S. HIV/AIDS Epidemic

This paper demonstrates how Zoe Leonard’s 1991-92 photographs of wax anatomical models engage issues of medical bias in research and treatment of people assigned female at birth (AFAB) at the height of the United States HIV/AIDS epidemic. As a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Leonard contributed to activist projects that supported and educated AFAB people, including the 1990 publication Women, AIDS, and Activism. In her photographs, Leonards presents the models as manifestations of the inequalities at work in the HIV/AIDS epidemic: a statement about which bodies were considered worthy of study and treatment. Originally created in the eighteenth century, these “anatomical Venuses” served as an alternative to human dissection to educate medical professionals about female anatomy. They were stylized as beautiful, sensual, idealized bodies, a jarring contrast to their demountable torsos and dissectible internal anatomy. Leonard’s photographs have previously been considered as interventions into discourses about the objectification of female bodies. However, this paper extends this interpretation to place these photographs in dialogue with Leonard’s activist politics and the exigencies of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Following Leonard’s engagement with the loaded history of the anatomical model, this paper shows how bias in human body research and stagnation in public health institutions’ responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic produced gaps in actionable medical knowledge for AFAB people in the crisis—and how artists and activists mobilized to reveal these gaps and provide life-saving information in response.

Thisbe Gensler, Getty Research Institute

Tavares Strachan’s Anatomical Effigies

This paper examines anatomical portraits by Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan, which pay tribute to overlooked historical figures, including Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first black astronaut, and Rosalind Franklin, the chemist whose research was critical to the discovery of DNA. Mobilizing the visual vocabulary of medicine, Strachan models anatomical effigies in a variety of media, from neon skeletons to blown-glass sculptures of circulatory systems and organs, which oscillate from invisible to visible when submerged in oil-filled vitrines.

These bodily portraits are part of a multi-media project examining the nature of invisibility, in which Strachan seeks to grant visibility to marginalized people and histories. His conceptual practice interrogates systems of cultural erasure and absence, confronting the institutions of power that gatekeep knowledge and truth. Anatomy and its medical applications have been mobilized in support of racist ideologies and discriminatory policies, offering purported legitimacy to eugenics, slavery, colonialism and the oppression of women—the same systems which have prevented his subjects from occupying their rightful place in history. Strachan’s efforts to transcend invisibility rehearse the fundamental task of anatomical illustration and clinical medicine itself — to make the obscured internal body visible to observation. Yet his revelatory anatomies do not serve medical inquiry, rather they illuminate identity, assert subjectivity, and insist upon a collective universal humanity. Indeed, the invisible object is not the organic tissues or physiological systems under the skin, but the cultural and social forces pressing upon the human body.

Lucy Weir, University of Edinburgh

Performance on the psychiatric ward: The elective confinements of Sergei Bugaev and Yang Zhichao

This paper offers a comparative analysis of two durational events in which the artist enters the realm of the psychiatric hospital – Krimania (1993) by Sergei Bugaev, and Jiayu Pass (1999) by Yang Zhichao. Both occur within postsocialist contexts – Russia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and China at the turn of the millennium. In each case, the artist deliberately sought psychiatric admission through clinical assessment, documented their experience through diary entries, and interacted with patients and staff.

Despite striking parallels, neither artist was aware of the other’s work. Both pieces took place during periods of significant societal change – Bugaev directly relates his endeavour to his loss of identity following the collapse, while Yang’s work belongs to a wider oeuvre that explores issues of social power and structural hierarchies in China. However, these events also reflect troubling histories of psychiatric abuse in Soviet and Chinese contexts, where ingrained stigma reinforced the perception of psychiatric patients as dangerous or unfit to integrate into the wider society, thus effectively silencing dissidents and political opponents.

Through close analysis of these psychiatric ‘performances,’ I propose that Bugaev and Yang repurpose highly controlled and surveilled environments to become platforms for transgression – specifically, that they reject codes of socialist conduct by failing to operate as useful and industrious members of society. By emphasising tensions between the individual and the collective, private and public spaces, the margins of society and its mainstream, these artists invite sincere reflection on the perilousness of individual security in the postsocialist environment.

Hannah Forsythe, University of Texas at Austin, Radio-Television-Film

An Invisible Pain: Migraines, Medical Imaging, and the Artistic Challenge to the Medical Gaze

This paper examines how cinema and experimental film reimagine the visibility of migraine within contemporary visual culture—a neurological condition that eludes the diagnostic reach of medical imaging. Building on Michel Foucault’s account of the clinical gaze and drawing from Lisa Cartwright’s Screening the Body (1995) and Kirsten Ostherr’s Medical Visions (2013), it situates the moving image within a longer genealogy of visualizing medicine and its ethical, aesthetic, and institutional dimensions.

Through analyses of Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949) from the Hollywood feature film archive, Susanna Styron’s documentary Out of My Head (2018), and Philip Woolridge’s experimental short Hemicrania (2022) from the American Migraine Foundation collection, the paper traces how techniques of duration, repetition, and sensory distortion visualize pain as a fluctuating temporality rather than a fixed symptom. These works—spanning classical cinema, documentary, and experimental practice—render migraine as a perceptual disruption, where pain pulses with time, and the act of seeing itself becomes unstable.

By situating these films across medical, cinematic, and archival contexts, the paper argues that moving images expose the ethical and aesthetic limits of medical visibility. Film’s durational form captures what diagnostic technologies cannot: the lived rhythm and instability of pain. In doing so, it reframes looking as an ethical act—one that transforms clinical observation into a site of empathy, vulnerability, and recognition.