The Body Electric isn’t just that song from Fame. Of course, it’s a book too, and a Walt Whitman poem, but it’s also the title of a new show at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) which presents more than seventy works by an international group of artists spanning the past fifty years, who use screens as a site through which to explore the body and identity; and notions of gender, sexuality, class and race. A work that especially caught our eyes (excuse the pun) is this piece by Aneta Grzeszykowska, a multimedia artist from Warsaw, Poland, entitled Selfie #10, from 2014. One of a broader series of eerie “selfies”, the piece aims to provoke questions around the relationship between one’s own identity and the masks we wear, and the limitations of aesthetic representation as a reflection of the self. The pieces use pig skin as replicas for the artist’s facial features and body parts, which are then photographed. They’re creepy, and strange, but ultimately somehow very beautiful. The Body Electric show runs from 6 September until 26 January next year.
