This year, I am honored to organize a session entitled: Transparent Flesh: Reimagining the Medical Image in Contemporary Art at the ASSOCIATION FOR ART HISTORY 2026 ANNUAL CONFERENCE.
This session explores how contemporary art engages in a critical dialogue with medical images: X-rays, MRIs, biomedical visualizations, surgical technologies, and other devices for rendering the living body visible. The aim is to consider the body as a site of both transparency and opacity, situated between scientific knowledge and artistic imaginaries, between clinical objectification and subjective experience.
We will examine how artists, researchers, and art historians reinvent these representations:
- by exploring their aesthetic and poetic potential,
- by interrogating the medical norms that shape our conceptions of the body,
- and by opening the way toward new critical and political readings of technologies of vision.
Corps, sciences and arts
This session investigates how contemporary art engages with the visual regimes of medical imaging to question dominant narratives of bodily transparency, objectivity, and control. From X-rays and MRIs to 3D scans and AI-generated diagnostics, the medical image has come to signify a form of truth about the body—an interior visibility that supposedly bypasses subjectivity. Yet these images, often stripped of personhood, sensation, and context, also produce a visual abstraction of the self: a “transparent flesh” that is both hyper-visible and disembodied, clinically legible yet phenomenologically opaque.
Artists working across photography, installation, performance, and digital media have increasingly responded to this paradox, reclaiming the space of medical representation as one of critique, fiction, and resistance. Through reappropriation, distortion, layering, or juxtaposition with affective material, such practices foreground the lived body as unstable, fragmentary, or wounded—challenging the supposed neutrality of medical imagery and its embedded epistemologies. These works raise pressing questions: How is the medical gaze racialized, gendered, or ableist? How can artistic interventions subvert its logics of surveillance, normalization, and extraction? And what kinds of visibility—and invisibility—do they offer in return?
This session invites papers that explore these intersections, whether through historical case studies, critical theory, curatorial projects, or practice-based research. Topics might include the aesthetics of the scan, the politics of bodily data, the phenomenology of being imaged, or the ethics of representing illness and trauma. We particularly welcome contributions that engage feminist, queer, crip, and posthuman perspectives to reframe how bodies are seen, imagined, and contested.
This half-day session will feature artistic works and theoretical presentations. This structure is designed to foster focused, in-depth engagement with each contribution and to allow for meaningful dialogue between presenters and the audience.
Registration to join the interdisciplinary and international dialogue at the University of Cambridge
To register for this session, click HERE
Image from the official website of the ASSOCIATION FOR ART HISTORY 2026 ANNUAL CONFERENCE