COVID-19 and Immersive Installation: Annette Messager’s “Penetrables” by Kathryn Barulich

ANNETTE MESSAGER, PENETRATION (PÉNÉTRATION), 1992-94. SCULPTURES, INSTALLATION, COTTON STUFFED WITH POLYESTER, ANGORA WOOL, NYLON, ELECTRIC LIGHTS. INSTALLATION (VARIABLE: 500 H X 500 W X 1100 CM). NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA, APRIL 1996.

As we enter another year, Dissolve invites you to partake in Annette Messager’s work and reflect on the flesh, marrow, and sinew existing at the interior of life. Messager’s immersive installation Penetration brings the beholder inside of the body into a forest of organs. The work takes up the iconography of anatomical illustration, a specific tradition of knowledge production that calls for re-examination considering our recent and ongoing experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, and, more specifically, the imaging of the virus. In this essay, Kathryn Barulich interrogates how the body and selfhood might be conceived of differently.

Read Barulich’s essay at the link below:

COVID-19 and Immersive Installation: Annette Messager’s “Penetrables” by Kathryn Barulich

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