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In recent years, the most widely disseminated cross-pollinations
between artistic and medical forms of representation have gravitated
around our enduring fascination with “visualizing the real.” Art
exhibitions, as well as television series, increasingly displayed the
human body’s hidden landscapes, presenting them as uncharted
territories open to the scrutiny of untrained eyes. “Biotourism”[1] is
now accessible to all, having spread for example with Orlan’s infamous
performances of plastic surgeries, disseminated around the world in
real-time, and with the display of actual écorchés before viewers in touring exhibitions of Körperwelten.
While the promise of “exposing the real” can explain what draws the
general public to representations derived from medical procedures, the
interest of such practices is not however limited to their
exhibitionistic appeal. Beyond the spectacle of hidden anatomies,
cross-pollinations between art and medicine can potentially breed
critical insights into the assumptions that constitute the fundaments
of each discipline. What might the visual epistemologies of medicine
reveal about the processes underlying artistic practice, for instance?
Can art in turn extend beyond its conventional aesthetic or even
therapeutic functions when integrated into the medical sphere? “Beyond
Biotourism” brings together presentations by researchers from the
medical humanities, whose investigations into specific instances of art
and medicine cross-pollinations provide the frameworks with which to
address these questions.
[1] Biotourism is the “transformation of bodies into landscapes,
their re-creation as a bioscape for imagined travel, and the
establishment of regimes of truth and knowledge by rendering the
invisible visible.” Kim Sawchuk, “Parables of a Biotourist,”
HorizonZero 6 (January 2003) <http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/see.php?is=6&file=10&tlang=0>
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