Falke Pisano. The Body in Crisis (Housing, Treating and Depicting)

The Body in Crisis (Housing, Treating and Depicting) examines the history of modern medicine in relation to the history of the Sabatini Building (originally a shelter for beggars, it later became a general hospital), linking its history with certain crucial moments in 20th century Spain, which can be found represented in the Museum's collection. The development of public healthcare in Spain is thus shown to be interwoven with works of the collection that depict bodies in situations of poverty, hunger and war. By doing so, Pisano looks at the ability of representation to pose questions of medicine in direct relation to social and political realities.

The performance takes place within a sculpture installation that acts as an exhibition structure. While the artist reads a text, accompanied by slide show, a second participant hangs a series of images in the installation. While the montage is underway, viewers move around the room. With this set-up, Pisano draws attention to questions related to semiosis in representational space, as created in the museum but also in artistic practices that deal with certain moments in history.

After several years dedicated to her series Figures of Speech (2005-2010), Falke Pisano recently introduced a new series of propositions and inquiries that look at the body in crisis as an ongoing event. Taking the idea of Walter Benjamin, according to which the state of emergency we live in is the rule, the artist focuses on two questions: first, she analyses the historical and continuous reiteration of the human body finding itself in moments of crisis, thus exposing the changing political, social and economic structures. Secondly, she formulates an inquiry into the formal possibilities of depicting the body in crisis in the realm of art. The work of Falke Pisano therefore has a lot to do with modernity conceived as a long process in continual transformation, determined by the life experiences from which it is viewed, the succession of artistic objects over time and the transformation of structures of communication and perception.