eternal body

2013, Victory Obsessed, Zamek Culture Centre, Poznan (exhibition view)

2013, video (excerpt)

2013, video installation

In the summer of 1014 the famous battle of Kleidon (mt. Belasica) between the Tsar Samuel’s and the Byzantine army took place. It is said that the Byzantine Emperor, Vasilios II captured 15,000 Samuel’s soldiers and blinded all of them, leaving every 100th soldier with one eye in order to lead the rest of the army back to their ruler. When Samuel saw the broken remains of his once gallant army, he died of a heart attack.

The event can be seen as an act of revenge, a punishment, or as a frightening act. However the result is an army transformed into a mass of living bodies deprived of an important function. With that their role of political and social beings is changed.

Great parts of human history can be read as history of the human body – society relations, including the examples of mutilations that have been carried out purposefully or various strategies of “body discipline”. Yet in all of them the result is a human being transformed into a “docile body”, a body that is ready to be subject of political control.

Eternal Body