TITLE_NAME :
Las mujeres que lloran están enfadadas

15/03/2023 - 20/05/2023

ROCIO SANTA CRUZ 
Calle Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 627 - 2 
 
08010 BARCELONE

rociosantacruz.com   

 
Although ORLAN’s contribution to the history of performance art is essential, it would be wrong to reduce her work to this practice. Moreover, she herself has always stressed that she is not subject to any of them, to any medium. It is clearly the subject that takes precedence in her work, since she questions above all social phenomena; she wonders then how to give the best materiality, the most relevant form to her thought. This can certainly go through performance, but also through photography, video, sculpture, collage or even painting, with also recourse to biotechnologies, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and robotics. The most recent works include notably NFTs and generative digital works. The artist does not forbid herself any medium, any technology.

From her beginnings in 1964, when she was only 16 or 17 years old (and when the age of majority in France was 21 at the time), ORLAN gave birth to herself … « d’elle m’aime ». With startling precocity. While her destiny as a woman condemned the adolescent she was then to use her body and her womb only to give birth, the very young artist rebelled against her condition as a woman and against the revolting fate to which she was thereby destiny. The only birth to which she conceded was that of her own role as an artist and her work to come. The reappropriation of the body thus took shape, first of all through photographic staging. Quickly, she notably resorted to distorting perspective to modify the contours of her appearance, as in her spectacular Nu descendant l’escalier en talons compensés from 1967.