FOCUS BIENNALE: UNTITLED (SEX ROBOT) | SIDSEL MEINECHE HANSEN

Sitting with her back against the wall, a wooden puppet seems almost intent on reflecting on the day just past and the future that awaits it, with a melancholy look almost of resignation. Observing the figure better we can recognize the characteristics that define its use: Untitled (Sex Robot) (2018-2019) is not a simple puppet but wants to be a allusion to the anatomy that distinguishes dolls used for sexual and pornographic purposes.

The artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen, in showing this object, whose status of sculpture is conferred by being inside the exhibition, proposes a provocative and disconcerting art about the body. Now it has lost any specific characterization, becomes a commodity of consumption.

Untitles (Sex Robot) playing on the threshold of the human and the object, proposes a reflection on the objectification of the body to be considered in its physical dimension as well as visual, the human being is no longer free from its image, but he/she seems to have become its victim. With this sculpture Hansen emphasizes that, within pornography and just as in everyday life, the physical appearance of the human being loses any qualification of thought or emotion to become an object, whose fundamental characteristic is functionality. Man is transformed into a product, his/her image becomes one of the many dictated by a specific taste aimed at satisfying a common desire produced by a consumer thought.

Man has become a product of himself, an object of consumption and pleasure of others. Fully integrated into a production, distribution and sales dimension, the body becomes a work in progress of construction and refinement in which personal characterizations fade in favor of a generalized image, that is not the result of a set of values but of a taste dictated by the rules of capitalist and consumer production.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen
Untitled (Sex Robot), 2018-2019
Ball jointed wooden doll
All works with the additional support of Danish Arts Foundation; the Henry Moore Foundation
59 International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams
© Photo: Marco Cappelletti, courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia

30/07/2022