Three pictures by Anoush Abrar. The first is in co-authroship with Aimée Hoving, and was a co-authorship, a Christmas Cover (!) for Das Magazin. The second comes from a series that answers the theme ""attractive and repulsive images". The second is from the Realdolls series portraying silicone dolls made in California.
Our human selves, as bodies, are shape, are skin, body hair... Manipulating the elements of the definition brings about strange creatures, disgusting and fascinating in their unworldliness. It isn't about the simulacrum, about the virtual dominion over our idea of reality. Rather, it is the exploration of our unrealness, the impossible shape that is human. What are we to do with it? How are we to deal with the body that is never quite what we feel it to be? So the question is not Who am I?, but What am I? How dare I include this and that, and for God's sake where is my perfection?! I deserve it. I deserve corresponding to what I believe in, to what I live as.
But doesn't the language of merit (of deserving) hide our incapacity to cope with the neutrality of what is, or to differentiate between what is and what our concepts allow us to believe?
