Perform it again! Women Images, Hostorical Archives and Contemporary Art

The paper will present and discuss some works of three contemporary artists who restore a visual genealogy of gendered corporeal control, using cultural historical archives. Enacting hyper-realistic photos, they evoke almost literally the action of modernity on women body, transformed into privileged object of social control and foucaultian medical clinique, using ‘the photo as a come-back of the death’ (as Roland Barthes suggests) and a come-back of a repressed image. American photographer Cindy Sherman and Indian artist Tajal Shah recreated images from historical and visual archive of nineteenth-century hysteria represented by Iconographie Photographique de la Salpetrière (1876-80). Focusing on ambiguous role played by nineteenth-century medical photography representing female bodies, Sherman and Shah perform realistically faces, clothes and gestures of hysterical women from the past, which have been central in psychiatry and psychoanalysis history, but at the same time which have been forgotten in the historical narrative. Crossing ‘medical’ images as figures of a gendered imaginary, the artists challenge gender stereotypes of hysteria as feminine disease, and enact a provocative statement: they share a gendered visual genealogy identifying themselves with it, and – at the same time – they assert a distance to an encoded gendered role. Swedish photographer and video-maker Ann-Sofi Siden, with her work Codex 1993-2005, recovers judicial archive documents from Middle Age to nineteenth-century, concerning processes against some `deviant' women. Focusing on the ferocity of social control on women bodies, she enacts an upsetting gallery of photos of hyper-realistic reconstructed portraits of women in atrocious positions, victims of cruel or bizarre corporal punishments or tortures. As the judicial documents put the persons on the light of history – she said - paradoxically we can ‘know’ those women only because of (and after) their confrontation with law. Reversing the calm and transparent light of Vermeer, Siden points out the obscure side of modernity with his gendered bodily effects, The paper will finally discuss how the critical use of historical archives seems to challenge the contemporary spectacle of pain performed by media, and points up the cultural and historical quality of bodies, with their ancient marks produced by gender, religion, policy, science and medicine, as political technologies