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Interview
BiographyBorn 30 May 1947 in Saint-Etienne in France, Orlan (http://wwwusers.imaginet.fr/~pezner/artistes/bio.html) is one of the most extreme performance artists, whose recent work is based on an original ‘material’, herself. Since May 1990 she has undergone a series of plastic surgical operations, entitled The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, to transform herself into a new being, modelled on Venus, Diana, Europa, Psyche and Mona Lisa. Orlan claims the right to intervene on her own body, the possibility of projecting beyond the restrictions of legal controls (Orlan believes that one of the problems which needs to be confronted is that of one’s own legal identity a problem she confronted the Danish police with in 1997), and to reflect and make others reflect in a challenging way on the horizons of change in the world. Combining a baroque iconography, medical technology and information technology, the theatre and mass communication networks, her work challenges the traditional conceptions of beauty and the Western concept of identity and otherness. Orlan gave her first performance in 1964. In 1978 she gave her first surgical performance: an emergency operation recorded on video. |
   
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| On 21 November 1993, in New York, she gave a week’s surgery-performance during
which she had two silicon implants placed on her forehead, creating two protuberances. In 1982 she founded Art-Accès, the first contemporary art magazine on Minitel, the French national communication network. In 1983 she was asked by the French Ministry of Culture to prepare a report on Performance Art and in 1984 she taught at the all Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dijon. In 1998 she worked with Pierre Zovilé on computer photographs and several video-installations which took as their starting point the transformations of the body among the Mayan and Olmechi. She has exhibited worldwide and has been supported by the French Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. |
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