The Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow invites you to the exhibition of Stelarc, an Australian body art and permance artist, doctor honoris causa of the Krakow university.

PERFORMANCE at Cricoteka:
6 October 2023, 6pm
Cricoteka Centre for Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor | 2-4 Nadwiślańska St.

„The body has become a contemporary chimera of meat, metal and code, performing beyond the boundaries of the skin and beyond the local space it inhabits. In this technological terrain the body requires sensory, machinic and computational augmentation. The necessity for alternative anatomical architectures. In this age of body hacking, gene mapping, prosthetic augmentation, organ swapping, face transplants, synthetic skin, what it means to be a body, what it means to be human and what generates aliveness and agency becomes problematic. In the spaces of proliferating Prosthetic Bodies, Partial Life and Artificial Life, the biological body become profoundly obsolete. The body is no-body at all. The body is no longer an object of desire, but rather a body that requires re-imagining and re-designing. The body now experiences itself as involuntary, automated and absent to its own agency. The body is now
remotely propelled and projected into remote spaces. Its awareness can be extruded and its physicality recedes. It becomes an extended operational system. We no longer function “all-here” in this body nor “all-there” in that body but “partly-here” sometimes and “partly-there” other times. Presence now becomes problematic. Presence is marked by a double absence, or perhaps absence is marked by a double presence. Awareness slips and slides between spaces and situations, oscillating seamlessly between the actual and the virtual. We continue to perform as biological bodies offline and phantom bodies online. Phantoms not as phantasmatic but rather as phantom limbs. The self becomes situated beyond the skin, and the body is emptied. But this emptiness is not an emptiness of lack but rather a radical emptiness through excess. An emptiness from the extrusion and extension of its capabilities, its augmented sensory antennae and its increasingly remote functioning. What becomes important is not merely the body's identity, but its connectivity – not its mobility or  or location, but its interface”. (Stelarc, 2023)