Corpus Cosmos

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. The exhibition features 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 theme of the exhibition

The professor of the history of science and ideas Karin Johannisson describes how the Renaissance vernacular body was open to the world, nature and cosmos. This contrasts sharply with the modern hermetic body that materialised later on. The latter is autonomous but also solitary. And it is indeed remarkable how the contemporary body is perpetually being reshaped for outer perfection. Despite cuttingedge medical science and a growing range of treatments, mental illness has paradoxically never been as widespread in society. These complex links between the outer and inner body, medicine and spirit, provide an underlying invisible grid for the exhibition.

In Corpus Cosmos, the historical reflections range from mediaeval mysticism to Baroque anatomical demonstrations. Olof Rudbeck’s anatomical theatre at Gustavianum, becomes a reference point, as a temple of science and of the Renaissance perspective on the body as a microcosm. The body was explored and dissected simultaneously with colonial travels, the development of cartography and the establishment of the heliocentric world view.

The artworks in the exhibition

The exhibition features several newly produced works. The artworks change shape and we as visitors are allowed to glide between different states. The surgical incision becomes a metaphor, a movement between the body as a surface, seen through a clinical gaze, to inner pulsating life.

In the exhibition, the incision through skin tissue, nerve fibres and muscles may also represent mining and the extraction of raw materials – a crust of earth that is being cut apart. Corpus Cosmos depicts contemporary processes of decolonisation, in which the need of indigenous peoples to return to original cosmologies is central. This complex narrative includes abuses, spiritual as well as physical.