Turned Inside Out:
On the Interplay Between Medical Visualization Tools in Art and the Abject Body
by Malin Cäcilie Krahn
How we understand and engage with the body has changed over time. With the development of cameras and video technology, we can look at it from every angle, far away, up close, and into every crevice deep inside. Especially through the development of medical visualization tools, the body has become penetrable and explorable. For the general public, it used to be possible to view only the outside of the body, and even for doctors and medical personnel an internal view was accessible only by cutting into it—through the skin. Now, however, it can be represented in all its details and intricacies, without (or only barely) making a cut. This way of gaining access to the body shifts our understanding of bodily integrity. Thus, these developments are significant not only in their medical capacity but also in their potential for cultural transformation of the body. Virtually every part of the body has become visible and knowable through these tools, yet at the same time, they are the very source of the imagery that renders the body more foreign than familiar. Particularly in the experience of patients or laypersons, they produce unnerving images that are often difficult to reconcile with our concepts of bodily norms and integrity, bringing bodies into existence that might disgust and revolt the viewer but also allure and capture their attention. At the site where borders and representations of the body collapse with the use of medical imagery, an abject body is produced. The concept of abjection was formulated by linguist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva in 1980 and describes the psychological state of fear, disgust, or repulsion that is triggered by matter that is simultaneously beyond and of the subject, in an ambiguous state of relationality between I and Other, integration and expulsion.1 Abjection is not inherent to an object or subject but is the reaction to its state, which can simultaneously be disgusting and alluring, and is produced when something exists outside its socially determined place.2 Medical visualization tools can create this state of ambiguity, as they turn the body inside out. This essay examines the relation between medical visualization tools and the construction of an abject body. Drawing on examples by artists Mona Hatoum and VALIE EXPORT I argue that these technologies blur the boundaries of the body, rendering it fragmented and penetrable. By turning it inside out, these artists expose the societal, gendered norms that structure bodily representations, and by using the disruptive qualities of the abject create a resistant body.
Stepping Inside
Sliding along dark and glistening, never-ending orifices and the steady murmur of a heartbeat is what awaits the viewer stepping into Mona Hatoum’s 1994 Video Installation Corps étranger (fr.: foreign body). Enclosed by a cylindrical capsule with two openings on either side for entering and exiting the installation, the video is projected from the ceiling onto a circular screen on the floor. When stepping inside the construction, the visitors are taken on a journey through the artist’s body. Starting off on the outer surface of her body, the projection explores her eyes and mouth, vulva and anus, and then goes on to glide through the interior of Hatoum’s body, confronting the viewer with a disorienting view of mostly indiscernible fluids, organs, and the body’s inner workings. The body that is encountered is fragmented and, in this sense, distorted. The video material of the installation consists of combined footage from a colonoscopy as well as an endoscopic examination of Hatoum’s own body. With the addition of the sounds of her breathing, the beating of her heart, and other somatic sounds, she not only gives the visitors a visual entry into her body but also encloses them in the sounds of a living and breathing organism.3 This absorption into the body can be discomforting and disorientating for the viewer. There are different aspects to consider when looking at how this disorientation is produced. On the one hand, the borders of an integral body are transgressed by the camera penetrating Hatoum’s body, rendering it fragmented and pliable, as the video never shows her body in its entirety and – maybe more importantly – does not offer any sense of a representation of the body that spectators would be accustomed to. On the other hand, through the way the installation is constructed the visitors themselves are part of this destabilization. Inside the capsule the projection with a width of ca. 1,40 m fills almost the entirety of the floor, leaving only a small band (ca. 55 cm) of space to the sides. Within this confined space the possibility of contact between the visitor and Hatoum’s body is tangible, particularly when one imagines multiple people standing inside it. Stepping into Hatoum’s body, perhaps even becoming part of it, when one steps under the light of the projector, creates a feeling of unease. Supposedly because the visitor usually stays at a distance from the artworks in museums – looking, not touching – or because the visitors themselves become the disturbers of bodily integrity, thereby causing their own discomfort. This disturbance closely links Hatoum’s installation to themes of abjection, as the “borders of the object and the subject cannot be maintained”4 here, neither by the visitor, who through the immersive character of the installation becomes simultaneously voyeur and object of their own voyeurism nor by the artist’s body. The abject is thus not created by the contact with bodily fluids or images that one finds gross or revolting per se but by their existence outside of their socially determined place.5 By their crossing into foreign territories, they transgress the boundaries of what constitutes our visions of bodily integrity.
Fig. 1: VALIE EXPORT, I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head, 2008. Performance film, video 2007, sound, color, 11’38’’. Film Still. VALIE EXPORT Filmproduktion Vienna, © VALIE EXPORT.
Speaking from Within
The relationship between the body, identity, and technology has also been implicated in VALIE EXPORT’s works on different occasions.6 More recently she has used actual medical instruments to record her own glottis for her installation I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head (2008) (fig. 1-3). The installation was developed from the performance The voice as performance, act and body shown at the Venice Biennale in 2007, as part of the Austrian exhibition The Pain of Utopia.7 For the performance, an internal view of the artist’s vocal folds while reciting a speech was recorded with a laryngoscope (an instrument used for medical examinations of the glottis or throat). These video images were then projected onto a screen next to the artist, allowing visitors to watch her 11-minute speech simultaneously from an external and internal perspective of her body. EXPORT’s muffled and constrained voice, obstructed by the invasive presence of the camera, highlighted the sensation of physical discomfort by the artist. In I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head the recordings made with the laryngoscope are projected onto multiple TV screens, accompanied by speakers playing her strained recital. Much like in Hatoum’s Corpse étranger, the body is presented in an abstracted, fragmented form of flesh, fluids, and folds. It is not immediately discernable which part of the body one is looking at, yet it is identifiable as being part of a living and breathing organism, and in combination with the muffled voice one might also make it out to be a human body.
This inversion of an internal process – as in Corpse étranger – takes place in the visual collapse of the internal and external body. The laryngoscope inserted into EXPORT’s throat blurs the lines of bodily integrity and what is classified as a representation of the body. Differing from Hatoum’s exploration, however, EXPORT confronts the spectator with a static view of the body. In I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head the visitor doesn’t move through it but sees the body moving, making it possible to observe the constant opening and closing of the vocal folds during the recital of the speech. In this sense, it seems it is less so about the immersion of the visitor in the work and more about observing the body that presents itself to us. The body, while also evoking a visceral reaction from the viewer, is at a distance. When engaging with the artwork, it is almost as if one is standing face to face with the body that is trying to speak, listening to it struggling in pain. This aspect of violence and force that is implicated in the externalization of this process has also been described by Elfriede Jelinek in her review Ungeduldetes, ungeduldiges Sichverschließen (ach, Stimme!). Here she writes: „In VALIE EXPORT’s video, the deepest part is turned outwards. It can't do that on its own, it has to be forced.“8 But not the externalization in the form of its images alone is violent, the insertion of the camera itself is visibly and audibly causing pain to the body. Witnessing this transgression of borders most likely puts those watching in a state of unease, while also drawing us to the images in an effort to decipher what it is we are looking at or what is being said. The voice and the body or, as the title of the original performance already suggested, the voice as body are integral to this work. By focusing on the glottis in her installation EXPORT is recording the place where vocal sounds are transformed into speech, where they become – formed by dialect and articulation – part of our identity.9 Voice and body, being both obstructed and exposed in this work, then become a site where vulnerability and resistance meet, making us reflect on the violence and suppression placed on the body.
Fig. 2: VALIE EXPORT, I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head, 2008. Performance film, video 2007, sound, color, 11’38’’. Film Still. VALIE EXPORT Filmproduktion Vienna, © VALIE EXPORT.
The Potential of an Abject Body
In both of the discussed works the body unfolds itself before us in unfamiliar ways and might make viewers grapple with the difficult task of reconciling this unfamiliarity with conventions of bodily representations. The body – particularly that of women and marginalized people – has historically been subjected to limitations and expectations imposed on it.10 The discussed installations can be seen as a continuation of the ongoing effort to challenge these confined stereotypes. This turn to making the body part of the artistic medium (in the context of the European and American art world)11 first began in the 1960s and 70s with the establishment of “body art.”12 The emergence of body art was shaped by the political context of upheaval at the time, with revolts against the Vietnam War and movements for women’s rights and sexual liberation.13 In this climate, many artists engaged with the body in the pursuit of challenging and disrupting societal norms of representation. Creating imagery that could disturb, disgust, or revolt the viewer, these abject forms held the possibility of liberation from rigid categories and provided an opportunity to gain control over bodily representations.14 Even though Kristeva would only develop the concept of abjection in the 80’s, it was already present in the art of this time. The abject body was a body that could evade societal expectations and transgress the boundaries imposed on it.15 Consequently, many artists engaging with themes of abjection did so in the pursuit of breaking with the status quo and challenging systems of oppression.16
Hatoum in her representation of an abject body inadvertently draws attention to the way women’s bodies have been displayed throughout art history, as well as the film and pornography industries.17 Their bodies have historically been objectified and made to satisfy male desire, but these fantasies placed on them are disrupted in Hatoum’s work. By penetrating it, the camera is simultaneously living out and disturbing male fantasies of the female body.18 This engagement with a disruptive and, in its imagery and representation, non-normative body is subverting those fantasies and exposing the objectification that is present. Thus, the disturbance felt in Hatoum’s Corpse étranger is not limited to the disturbance of bodily borders, in the sense that the skin that usually acts as a barrier is transgressed but also extends itself to notions of gender. The body presented is one that challenges the gendered gaze of society, as gender is not easily assigned here.19 Signifiers that help us make sense of a body are missing, further disturbing the fantasies imposed on it. The body and its political implications and embeddedness are also a continuous thread throughout VALIE EXPORT’s work. As previously said, the voice and one’s identity are linked in I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head, which becomes unmistakably clear when listening to the voiceover. “the voice is my identity”20 states EXPORT in her recital and this voice is not only being obstructed but also observed – it is being turned over. John Berger has argued that since women have been observed and surveyed by society and are constantly accompanied by their own image, they have learned and been persuaded to survey themselves.21 How they move and construct their identities within society is confined and scrutinized by patriarchy.
These aspects of violence and bodily transgression are present in both mentioned works. By engaging with the abject, Hatoum and EXPORT are exposing the violence inherent in dominant representations of the body and at the same time using its disruptive potential to turn it into a site of defiance.
Fig. 3: VALIE EXPORT, I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head, 2008. Performance film, video 2007, sound, color, 11’38’’. Film Still. VALIE EXPORT Filmproduktion Vienna, © VALIE EXPORT.
Dissolving Bodies
In 1987, VALIE EXPORT said of technology that it “[…] not only serves the cultural transformation of nature, but also has the tendency to transform and dissolve the body itself, precisely because technology is cultural activity.”22 This transformative quality makes the technological tools that were used to produce the bodies by Hatoum and EXPORT worth considering. Video was an important medium for challenging societal norms surrounding bodily representations, as video and the screen through which it is seen “mediate, and structure, our daily experience of reality and of ourselves.”23 The rise of video art coincides with that of body art. Accordingly, video art was similarly shaped by the political upheavals of the 1960s.24 Video was a medium capable of processing the questions and demands of the time.25 By displacing the body from its physical presence into the realm of the screen, video transformed our relationship to corporeality, offering a version of the body that is fragmented, fluid, and contingent upon the technological lens through which it is seen.26
In the discussed works it is viewed through the medical lens of endoscopic cameras, thus creating bodies that exist in those spheres. On a mere rational and practical level, these instruments and the images they produce are intended to further our understanding and exploration of the human body. They allow doctors to detect illnesses and medical conditions with the ultimate purpose of maintaining or restoring bodily functions. However, these developments in medical technology and imagery cannot be looked at in isolation, as this imagery is always embedded in a cultural, psychological, and political context.27 Medical images often are a site of revelation as they lay bare the body’s fragility, decay, or potential for death, confronting both patients and here also the viewer of the artworks with the corporeal limits. Looking at endoscopic technology in particular (as both artists used a type of endoscopic camera), the trajectory of a shift in the relationship to the body is clearly traceable. At its beginnings, the endoscopy consisted of enhancing the doctor’s vision while they cut into the patient’s body, with light and magnifying instruments. Technological advancements have made the scene of an endoscopy less and less “messy” so that now – as seen particularly in Hatoum’s work – it is possible to access the body without actually cutting into it.28 From a medical standpoint, this leaves the body intact and almost untouched, from a psychological and theoretical standpoint, however, it renders it more and more transparent and permeable.29 While the site of practical execution transitioned from the surgical table, where medical professionals would enter into direct contact with the patient’s organs or bodily fluids, to possibly a cleaner and less intrusive environment, the visuals produced by this method are characterized by a certain disorder pertaining to the corporeal identity the patients are confronted with. The ideas of corporeal integrity and identity are difficult to reconcile with the fragmentary body seen in those images.30 Even though we might have become more and more accustomed to images of medicalized bodies as they have found their way into pop culture, with shows like Grey’s Anatomy or Dr. House making mainstream audiences familiar with this kind of imagery, they are in these settings usually sedated and unable to act autonomously. The bodies that Hatoum and EXPORT confront their viewers with are conscious. They are conscious of their exposure and inversion, which makes the encounter with them even more unsettling.
Ultimately, both Hatoum and EXPORT install these images with the possibility of disrupting norms of representation and integrity by alienating these instruments from their intended functions and engaging with the images artistically. Their works show how these tools, designed to provide clarity and understanding for the human body, instead create a site of ambiguity and unease. The body becomes fragmented and pliable through the transgression of its constructed boundaries. This unsettling effect is not solely created by the instruments used but rather through their entanglement in a social-cultural framework of how we view the body. By exposing the tensions between visibility and control, subjectivity and objectification, they create a site where it resists these classifications.
Malin Krahn is currently completing her bachelor's degree in art history and social and cultural anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests lie in modern and contemporary art and feminist approaches to art history. Alongside her studies she works as a student assistant at the Collaborative Research Center „Intervening Arts“ at FU. She is also a member of the curatorial collective Kleine Humboldt Galerie.
1 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror (Columbia University Press, 1980), 10.
2 Ibid., 4.
3 See: Ewa Lajer-Bucharth, “Real bodies/Video in the 1990s,“, Art History 20, no. 2 (June 1997), 185–213 and Stephen Monteiro, "Private Dis-Pleasures: Mona Hatoum, Mediated Bodies and the Peep Show," in Screen Presence (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 102–143.
4 Charles Penwarden and Julia Kristeva, “Of Word and Flesh: An Interview with Julia Kristeva,” in Morgan and Morris, eds., Rites of Passage, 22. Quoted in: Monteiro, “Private Dis-Pleasures.”
5 Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 4.
6 Cf.: Walter Moser, et al., eds., VALIE EXPORT, exhib. cat., Wien, Albertina, 23.06.-01.10.23; Winterthur, Fotomuseum, 25.02.-29.05.23; Berlin, C/O, 27.01.-24.05.24, München, London, New York, 2023, 60.
7 „I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head”, VALIE EXPORT Website, https://valieexport.at/jart/prj3/valie_export_web/main.jart?rel=de&reserve-mode=active&content-id=1526555820281&tt_news_id=4107 (accessed 26.01.2025).
8 Elfriede Jelinek, „Ungeduldetes, ungeduldiges Sichverschließen (ach, Stimme!)“ zu Valie Exports Performancefilm, I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head (2008), https://original.elfriedejelinek.com (accessed 28.01.25). My translation.
9 Moser, et al., eds., exhib. cat. VALIE EXPORT.
10 This is not to suggest that men are free from societal expectations regarding the body. However, patriarchal, heteronormative, and racist structures reinforce their dominance, systematically positioning them in roles of authority and power.
11 The Gutai group in Japan turned to the body in the 1950s. See: Namiko Kunimoto, “Tanaka Atsuko’s “Electric Dress” and the Circuits of Subjectivity,” in The Art Bulletin 95, no. 3 (September 2013): 465–483, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/43188842.pdf (accessed 10.05.2025).
12 Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, eds., The artist’s body (Phaidon Press, 2000), 18.
13 “Body Art,” Hatje Cantz, https://www.hatjecantz.de/blogs/kunstlexikon/body-art. (accessed 24.02.2025).
14 See: Warr and Jones, eds., The artist’s body.
15 Ibid., 18.
16 Angela Krewani, Medienkunst. Theorie, Praxis, Ästhetik (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2016), 92.
17 For an extensive look at the relation between pornography and Mona Hatoum’s work see: Monteiro, “Private Dis-Pleasures,” 102–143.
18 Ibid., 126.
19 Ibid., 129.
20 From the performance I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head. Cited in Moser, et al., eds., exhib. cat. VALIE EXPORT, 62. My translation.
21 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin Books, 1972), 46.
22 VALIE EXPORT, Das Reale und sein Double: DER KÖRPER (Benteli Verlag, 1992), 6. My translation.
23 Ewa Lajer-Bucharth, “Real bodies/Video in the 1990s,“ Art History 20, no. 2 (June 1997), 190.
24 Krewani, Medienkunst. Theorie, Praxis, Ästhetik, 91.
25 Ibid., 92.
26 Cf.: Ewa Lajer-Bucharth, “Real bodies/Video in the 1990s.“
27 Rémy Portier, “Medical Imaging and Modern Art: Encounters over a Virtual Body,” Recherches en psychanalyse 2, no. 12 (2011), 140.
28 Jose van Dijck, “Fantastic Voyages in the Age of Endoscopy,” in The Transparent Body (University of Washington Press, 2011), 70.
29 Ibid., 68.
30 Ibid., 70.
Abbildungen
Fig. 1-3: VALIE EXPORT, I turn over the pictures of my voice in my head, 2008. Performance film, video 2007, sound, color, 11’38’’. Film Still. VALIE EXPORT Filmproduktion Vienna, © VALIE EXPORT.