BODY AS MATERIAL

BODY AS MATERIAL represents a conversation between artists Nancy Baker Cahill and Lauren Lee McCarthy centered on body sovereignty, surveillance, and forensics of control. This image combines a still from McCarthy’s deeply intimate durational performance Surrogate, with Terrortory, a still from an immersive video by Baker Cahill. Abstracted data visualized as pixels connects and blends the two. Both artists provoke complex questions around personal rights and abuses of power. As body autonomy is increasingly stripped from certain citizens, the artists challenge complicity and collective responsibility around protecting others from state-sanctioned cruelties. Some themes to be covered include surveillance infrastructure, voting rights, the criminalization of reproductive medicine, religious fundamentalism, neoliberalism, and technology as a tool of subversion and oppression. A portion of the proceeds of this NFT will go to the reproductive justice organization Mayday.Health.

Digital image: PNG file format, 4096 × 2304