BELLISSIMA

Bellissima / 2002-2004

With the slogan “Beauty now” a major exhibition project heralded at the end of the 90s the return of one of the themes of contemporary art, which the Avant garde had gingerly given up to the media and consumer culture. The reactualisation of the question of beauty, a question that seemed up until the 19^th century un-seperable from art, is of course not limited to a inner-aesthetical discussion. The viability of achieving ideals of beauty with a living body through surgical and soon possibly through genetical procedures, pushes the question of the cultural construction of a beautiful body into the foreground: What aesthetical assumptions follow these ideals, in which relation do they stand in regards to social, sexual, racial standards?

In the past at least since antiquity, art was assigned the function, together with religion, philosophy and science, to illustrate the definition of the perfect, the beautiful and the ’normal‘ body. Today this is the place of the (critical) analysis of these constructs; and perhaps also – in cross over with subcultural currents and cyborg-utopias – a testing ground for the arrangement of ‚other‘ beauties?

As part of an effort to explore the definition of beauty, the teaching project “bellissima” led by Alba D´Urbano, Tina Bara and Susanne Holschbach was created at the HGB Leipzig in 2002/2004, with the support of the HGB gallery director Christine Rink.

The project – accompanied by a seminar, a lecture series and two exhibitions, brought theoretical and artistic reflections about the theme into interrelation. Aside from the research on the theme “beauty” in the media society and in the field of art, the project reflected on the social implications of the inflated presence of “beauty” and made it possible to experience today’s social and cultural paradigm shift in regards to the aesthetic experience of what is the most beautiful, and equally most fragile, and contradictory.

Tina Bara, Alba D’Urbano, Susanne Holschbach, 2006

Project Website

Seminar & Lectures

The project commenced with a seminar dealing with corresponding aspects from art and media history as well as from philosophy and cultural theory from the antiquity until today. Dr. Maria Isabel Pena Aguado, enriched it with her workshop on the philosophical examination of the concept of beauty. One of the first excursions took us to the antiquity collection at Lindenau Museum, whose director, Dr. Jutta Penndorf, organised a tour on antiquity’s reception during classicism. The second station was a cosmetic surgery clinic, where Dr. med. Ziyad Al Chiriki and his team offered us the chance to observe cosmetic surgery using live digital transmission. The third consisted of a visit to the exhibition “The Nude in 20th Century Art” at Emden’s art museum, with Dr. Nils Ohlsen as our guide.

The seminar was accompanied by a lecture series:
Mona Hatoum, artist; Prof. Dr. B. Wegenstein, media theorist, Baltimore (“Getting under the Skin”); Dr. med. Z. Al Chiriki, surgeon, Leipzig; K. Schmid, journalist and author (“Digital Beauties. In Search of the Perfect Face”); Jan Winkelmann, curator (“Andy Warhol’s Glamour Factory”); Dr. Ute Ritschel, specialist for performance studies (“Beauty and Performance); and Prof. Dr. Claudia Benthien, theorist (“Beauty as Stigma. Suffering from Physical Perfection”).

Exhibitions

Midway through the project, an exhibition of international artistic positions (also titled Bellissima: body_construct_beauty) was held at the Academy’s gallery and at other school spaces from May 15 to June 25, 2003; it concluded with the exhibition Bellissima: reaction_construction_reflection (December 12, 2003 – January 10, 2004) in which Academy students presented their works on this subject.