UPPSALA.- The exhibition Corpus Cosmos seeks a dialogue on body experiences in the borderland between believing and knowing. The Latin word corpus indicates the body in medicine, and the Greek word cosmos indicates the idea of an organised universe. Uppsala Art Museum is located in a city centre very much defined by the presence of the university and cathedral.
In Corpus Cosmos, the historical reflections range from mediaeval mysticism to Baroque anatomical demonstrations. The anatomical theatre at Gustavianum in Uppsala, initiated and built by Olof Rudbeck the Elder (1630–1702), became an important site, as a temple of science and of the Renaissance perspective on the body as a microcosm.
The pious 17th-century man imagined that the soul existed in every part of the body: “The soul is found whole in our whole body and whole in every part of it, and gives form to everything corporeal,” read an invitation to a Swedish dissection in 1664.
The exhibition features several newly produced works. They portray various forms of corporality and perception, from human internal organs to the Earth as a cosmic entity. Installations, sculptures, video and paintings meets sounding works. The artist’s subjective view of the world blends dreamlike and hallucinatory scenes with analyses and incisions.
The Lithuanian duo Pakui Hardware consists of Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda. In sculptures and installations in hybrid materials, they investigate how technologies test, control and promise bodily fulfilment. The Host installation portray bodies in a state of limbo, where contemporary keyhole surgery is staged in a frozen tableau. An organ on an operating table in a transcendental state between death and eternal life.
Through sculptural costumes, Ingela Ihrman takes on the form of other living species, while exploring themes of desire and loneliness. The work One Fig can be read as a fantasy about the sensual flesh that the skin or peel conceals. The work becomes a representative of an animated view of the material. Ingela Ihrman lingers in the mediaeval world of ideas, where an ear of barley, a piece of bread, can also be the body of Christ. This shifting meaning, where the artworks change shape and the viewer is allowed to slip between different states, is a recurring theme in the exhibition.
Pia Sandström’s newly produced audiovisual installation I have Seen from Inside and the sculpture The Chamber deal with the experience of open-heart valve surgery, where the body is shut down and blood is released into an artificial bloodstream outside the body through the rigid tubes of a heart-and-lung machine. The work oscillates between the body seen as a surface, through a clinical gaze, to inner pulsating life where dream visions are evoked in a lowered state of consciousness. “a state where the body took over and narrated, perceived and mirrored,” says the artist.
The anatomical scientific breakthrough occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries, in parallel with colonial travel, the development of cartography and the establishment of the heliocentric worldview. In the exhibition, the cut through skin tissue, nerve fibres and muscles are also used to represent mining and the extraction of raw materials - a crust that is being cut apart. These are themes that Camila Sposati has explored in her art.
For many years, she has been returning to anatomical theatres and what the architecture represents. The Earth Anatomical Theatre project was carried out at the 2014 Bahia Biennial in her native Brazil. Using the theatre in Padua as a reference, she created a theatre that dug itself into the ground. In her sounding clay sculptures, in the series Phonosophia, Sposati searches for an agency in each individual object, where listening and feeling can give way to a new form of sensibility, a seeing from the inside out, that inverts our habitual perspectives.
Xadalu Tupã Jekupé belongs to the Guaraní indigenous people of southern Brazil. In his paintings, he portrays their cosmology, a way of being and thinking imbued with a sense of being part of nature, guided by the ancestors’ spirits. Through two painted scenes: Corpus Prosélytus, Xadalu Tupã Jekupé gives his interpretation of the Jesuit mission in Brazil, where the struggle for the spirit and the body are intimately linked. Physical violence and suffering are constant themes from early Christian martyrdom to the Guaraní people’s integration in the Christian community, and rebellion against the colonialists.
Curator: Rebecka Wigh Abrahamsson, Uppsala Art Museum
During the spring, there will be several opportunities to immerse yourself in the exhibition and its theme through lectures, panel discussions, dance performance, performance festival and guided tours.
