The Island of Dystopia

The article deals with the work of American artist Kiki Smith and her exploration of the body that means working towards a “primordial genesis of (sacred) bodies”, which is neither realistic nor metaphoric, but more a metonymic representation of a movement, a spasm of the body. The human body, in all its forms, from pleasure to pain, from healthiness to disease, from life to death, is a key figure in her poetic world. Smith’s art cannot be perceived passively and never is. Smith’s bodies are performative because they are always caught in a movement, in a moment before their action is being fulfilled. Their performance of pain and desperation determine in different ways the postures of their bodies. They occupy space and time, in a kind of silent scream that we can hear. Often the visitor has an embodied reaction to Smith’s art: from an impression of being admitted in a secret and sacred place, to feelings of violating its intimacy and discomfort that creates empathy as well for their suffering.