ForeignBodies

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We first “make Other” by seeing, by encountering physically. Looking at the body, we begin to categorize it. Othering is one of the first steps to identifying the self; one learns who she is in relation to/ against another. It's a method of self-identification, a construction of roles, a learning of boundaries. But it is also a way to discriminate, stigmatize, demonize, condemn. We exoticise, eroticize, fetishize and objectify what seems foreign. The process of making other applies to female bodies, ethnic bodies, queer bodies, immigrant bodies. It's a mode of exclusion and alienation, of fascination tempered by disgust, a desire covered over by fear. Each artist in this exhibition is evoking a body or a stand in for the body, and the bodies on view are ethnic, distorted, chaotic, ambiguously gendered. But each artist examines the body through his or her own lens. At times, an overt dialogue of Otherness is made visible; in other cases, it is merely a whisper heard through the layers of multiple voices.