What’s transhumanism? Transhumanism in its essence is advocating using subtle applied sciences and synthetic intelligence to boost the human situation (and cognition) within the type of enhancing skills and overcoming organic constraints. Transhumanism typically will get a adverse depiction in media and is typically pigeonholed as being a post-apocalyptic, post-human “nightmare”. That is what up to date artist Joanna Grochowska tries to unpick in her newest exhibition with its motto: “What Future Do We Need? What Should We Do To Get There?”, which is a quote from Klaus Schwab’s “The Nice Narrative: For a Higher Future”. The exhibition is the continuation of her earlier challenge dubbed “Opening the Future” that was offered in Munich in 2021.

Learn Extra: Artwork and Transhumanism: Humanity as a Challenge within the work of Joanna Grochowska

In 2020 LUXUO coated the work of Joanna Grochowska highlighting how she utilised the idea of “a Doll of Hans Bellmer” to depict eroticism, ache, and energy in a posthuman modified physique. That is what we see at this time, subversive imagery represented by unclothed human our bodies. Her haute pictures depicts eroticism, ache and energy throughout faceless figures in lifeless poses with out sexual organs and identifiable options.

Her 2024 showcase equally explores transhumanism and human enhancement applied sciences as a part of an ongoing dialogue about how the longer term will view morphological freedom. Utilizing the notions of “transgression” and “singularity” because the conceptual foundation of her artwork with transhuman and posthuman figurativeness being dominant themes, Joanna highlights the development of technological evolution with the emergence of recent paradigms in gender, physique, and identification.

Writer Natasha Vita-Extra writes that the philosophy of transhumanism offers with the elemental nature of actuality, information, and existence. She states “as a worldview, it affords a cultural ecology for understanding the human integration with know-how. As a scientific research, it supplies the strategies for observing how know-how is shaping society and the observe for investigating moral outcomes.” She goes on to delve into how a social narrative emerges from people overcoming odds and the continued need to construct a world value dwelling in. The processes that come out of it require vital pondering and visionary accounts to evaluate how know-how is altering human nature and what it means to be human in an unsure world.

German thinker Stefan Lorenz Sorgner debunks widespread myths about transhumanism stating “transhumanism is broadly misunderstood as a result of the media has exaggerated present applied sciences and branded the motion as harmful, main many to consider that hybrid people could quickly stroll amongst us and that immortality, achieved by way of mind-uploading, is imminent”.

There is a component of the grotesque within the work of Joanna Grochowska however carried out purposefully and artfully. Grotesque in itself is a visible artwork style that arguably began with the Romans however achieved notoriety within the 18th-century Renaissance period so it’s fascinating to see how Grochowska reinterprets his style to incorporate a futuristic take. Paying particular consideration to gender fluidity, lots of Grochowska’s work delineate the physique after a intercourse reassignment surgical procedure. Her work of merging human and know-how to indicate hybrid varieties isn’t merely an clever absurdity. Purposefully incongruous, distorted, and barely disturbing imagery is meant to make the viewer cease, suppose, and query perceptions of delight, ache and wonder.

Joanna Grochowska’s Transhumanism exhibition will happen from 18 February to 17 March 2024 on the Galerie Verbeeck – Van Dyck in Antwerp, Belgium.

Head to Joanna Grochowska’s web site and or try her Instagram account @facelesshumanforms for extra data.

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