March 14, 2026–January 3, 2027
“Overexposed” takes as its starting point one of modernity’s most auspicious convergences: the first public screening of the cinématographe by the Lumière brothers and, on the same day in 1895, the newspaper announcement of the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen. The exhibition, which claims to “examine the historical, medical, and sociopolitical implications of seeing inside the body,” is split into three parts, whose titles give a cursory sense of the show’s density and embedded ethos: “Technology and Power,” “Limits of the Gaze,” and “Care and Control.” Whereas the Lumière brothers’ infusion of time into the production of images has long been a touchstone within exhibition histories—to say nothing of the impact of moving images on art history as a whole—“Overexposed” takes a novel tack in hewing more closely to the trajectory forged by Röntgen, showcasing works that celebrate and challenge the uncanny ability to see into the body that medical imaging technology has engendered.
Educational and made-for-TV programs play a key role in the exhibition, providing a contextual framework of the chronology of medical imaging technology via monitors on wheels facing groupings of yellow classroom chairs. The exhibition design here recalls the mobile apparatuses that nurses wheel into patient rooms as much as the classrooms where these documentary programs may have screened. In including these materials, curator Sonia Epstein foregrounds the notion that the manner in which publics are educated about such technological advances is as much a means of artfully crafted storytelling as the ways in which artists wield such new technologies to further their own investigations.
In an era when the realm of science and technology has become increasingly politicized and rife with obscurantist logic, this approach is effective. Indeed, a wall text problematizes an excerpt from Martin Rikli’s Moving X rays (ca. 1938), an instructional documentary on the application of early X-ray technology for which Robert Janker, Germany’s first X-ray specialist, served as technical advisor. The text notes that Janker, who joined the Nazi party in 1933, was an avid campaigner for forced sterilization, occasionally undertaken by prolonged X-ray exposure. Later, an excerpt from Lars Wallén’s The Beginning of Life (1965), which features Lennart Nilsson’s endoscopic photographs of fetuses that prompted renewed furor within abortion debates, is displayed near Visible Woman (1997), the female sequel to the US National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project, which produced a dataset from scanned slices of a male human corpse to be publicly available for education and professional diagnostic analysis. Both are ostensibly didactic films; here they are utilized to position quandaries ranging from the limits of bodily autonomy to the social formation of conceptions of medical abnormality.
Following from “Technology and Power,” in which archival material charts the modernist optimism that understood these new means of technological perception as allowing for increased objectivity within scientific analysis, “Limits of the Gaze” opens with a series of film and video works installed along the gallery’s back wall and partitioned by black curtains. First among these is Barbara Hammer’s Sanctus (1990), in which the specter of Janker recurs: Hammer, while conducting research at the George Eastman Museum, discovered a tranche of 35mm films of moving-image X-rays produced in the 1950s by James Sibley Watson, Jr., likely influenced by Janker’s early experiments into cineradiology via prolonged X-ray exposure. In her resulting film, Hammer splices together these images, establishing a choreography among their skeletal subjects as they perform a range of activities, from personal grooming to eating and drinking.
Anna Kipervaser’s in ocula oculorum (2021) most succinctly investigates the twinned perceptual capacities of medical technology and the moving image at the level of form: the film oscillates between saturated brain scans, projection test screens, and digitally mediated representations of bones. The cinematic experiment climaxes with a flicker film, in which orange and blue frames alternate in such quick succession that the viewer’s brain produces illusions of shapes that don’t appear within the frames themselves—the moving image psychologized.
A sort of healthy pessimism flows as an undercurrent throughout the exhibition, harbingered perhaps by its title, which conjures a state of vulnerability, intrusion, or excess. Though the exhibition opens with the characteristic turn-of-the-century enthusiasm surrounding these new technologies—most light-heartedly manifest in the Lumière brothers’ Le Squelette Joyeux (1897), a twenty-second depiction of a dancing skeleton whose limbs detach and reattach in slapstick manner, and in Walt Disney’s famous The Skeleton Dance (1929)—the tone toward the latter half of the exhibition is one in which the latent anxiety associated with this capacity to finger the thresholds of vision and death has finally come to the fore.
A claustrophobic room is given over to Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s six-channel installation De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), where large monitors and projections showcase the range of experiences, from mundane administrative tasks to dire mishaps within a surgery, that befall employees within Paris’s public hospital system. Here, the medical industry becomes both alien and humanized, with a sequence on one screen showcasing doctors partying at a club, while another screen witnesses an eye surgery at extreme proximity.
The exhibition closes with Peggy Ahwesh’s The Third Body (2007), tucked into an alcove following Agnes Questionmark’s three-channel video installation Opera Medica (2025), a theatrical take on the anxieties surrounding the experience of gender confirmation surgery. In The Third Body, Ahwesh cuts between promotional footage for surgical devices and appropriated scenes of a reenactment of Adam and Eve exploring an exotic garden. Wall text proclaims the video as a cautionary tale of the endurance of gendered normativity despite technological advancement, though the video itself is not so explicit in its messaging. Positioned as the final work in the show, it becomes a veiled parable of sorts, likening the revelation of the body experienced in Eden to a newfound awareness engendered by advancements in medical imaging technology. Taken as a whole, “Overexposed” expresses a deep ambivalence about these developments.
