Design / Styling

ORLAN has long used the representation of her body to question current social phenomena from a critical distance. When we designate handbags and backpacks, we’re referring to the body. The bag is carried by the hand, but its name could lead us to believe that it contains hands, hence the idea of inscribing parts of the artist’s body on the bags, whether they are hand-held, back-held or other (impressions of the face, eye, ear, ear, hand…). The bag is like a prosthesis that allows us to carry the things we need. It is the development, the continuation of our pockets.

Already in 1964, in the CORPS-SCULPTURES series, she presented her naked body for the first time, most often without identity because hair, a mask or the position of her body concealed her face. In 1984, ORLAN created a mask printed with a photo of her vulva for her video performance, Mise en scène pour un grand fiat. She would later use this accessory on numerous occasions, notably in her Kiss on pussy performance. In her 1st Operation-Surgery-Performance, known as Sheriff’s Block, in 1986, she underwent surgery masked at times. Of course, in her self-hybridations with the masks of the Peking Opera in 2014, ORLAN uses Chinese masks to reclaim her place as a woman in a place where they are outlawed. Finally, with COVID21 , ORLAN has created several works based on the mask and the virus, creating usable masks with a photo of her vulva and her harlequinade on the inside of her body, with bacteria, cells and so on.

After a long discussion with him, she wanted to work with her own stem cells, and she proposed a project along these lines to the Institut Pasteur, which was refused by the ethics committee because it is forbidden in France to work with these cells. The body and its use are political and social. Our bodies don’t belong to us.

Finally, the Institut Pasteur, through Fabrice Hyber, invited him to work artistically in their new OMICS building, in the lobby of the Simone Veil and Alexandre Yersin buildings.

ORLAN has created a complete environment from colorful images of her cells and viruses, as in Le bœuf sur la langue, but in a different version. The words included in these colorful harlequinoid images were, for example, “rabies”, “pasteurella pestis”, “vaccine”, or “researcher”, a term that ORLAN greatly appreciates as it underlines the feminization of professional names, whereas Marie Curie, as a woman, suffered greatly from being a researcher among researchers.

The images were installed in light boxes and on a floor covering, on and under bleachers and on high round tables covered with this print. The final touch is a very large tondo, installed at the top of the white wall opposite the bleachers.

These dresses were worn by black models and were black on the back, but very colorful on the front. The furniture included a table with a revolving top and a very large semi-circular bench made up of interlocking stools on castors, on which the public sat during the many discussions organized during the exhibition about the words featured in the space. Participants could either stay in the conversation collectively, or roll up their seats and detach themselves from the group, and the conversation became individual again.

The concept of the exhibition was to blend design, fashion, art, sculpture, texts and medical imagery in a single venue, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes.

When we entered the installation, everything was black and we couldn’t understand what the mannequins were holding. The atmosphere was heavy, inquisitive, almost morbid. Moving into the oratory chapel, little by little it was possible to read texts like “dire”, “athée”, “sur-femme”, “symbiotique”… And, at the same time, see the front of the garments made from this very colorful silk velvet, like a harlequinade.

In 2009, ORLAN created the installation Suture-Hybridation-Recyclage, in which she hybridized her wardrobe following the same protocol with David Delfin, Maroussia Rebecq and Agatha Ruiz de la Prada, asking them to find a way of assembling two of her different garments to bring together times, materials, designers and moments in her history. Maroussia Rebecq has cut two garments and attached a small fluorescent yellow lace to bring them together, while David Delfin has attached ribbons full of staples, enabling them to be detached and reattached to another garment, creating a hybridization, or rather a temporary assembly and multiple shifting hybridizations.

Agatha Ruiz de la Prada proposed a more radical solution. She carefully selected beautiful dresses from her museum, cut them in half and then split ORLAN’s garments in half from the waist down and assembled them.

So each dress was recomposed with half an Agatha Ruiz de la Prada dress, and half dresses from ORLAN’s wardrobe, whose designer I don’t necessarily know. ORLAN has kept her entire wardrobe since adolescence.

LA RÉINCARNATION DE SAINTE-ORLAN OU IMAGES NOUVELLES-IMAGES DITES OPÉRATIONS-CHIRURGICALES-PERFORMANCES, is a series of 9 performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels and New York. ORLAN created this series to derail surgery from its habits of enhancement and rejuvenation, and to perform surgical operations that weren’t supposed to bring beauty, but ugliness, monstrosity and indesirability. 

The central idea behind these surgical operations was to combat stereotypes and models. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery, but against what we do with it. She uses this technique to invent the self-love by attacking the mask of the innate. The first condition with the different surgeons was no pain, because ORLAN is all for BODY-PLEASURE. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating theatre, turning it into her artist’s studio. She and the rest of the medical staff were costumed by a renowned designer working in collaboration with the artist. The performances were orchestrated by readings, and when the surgical gesture allowed it, ORLAN produced images, films, videos, photos, drawings with her blood and fingers, reliquaries with her fat and flesh, “holy-suaries” of sorts made with her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation onto which she made photographic transfers, and objects subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.

Police officers wanted to charge her with exhibitionism, but it was impossible because ORLAN was dressed from head to toe and had her identity papers in her bag. 

In the public space, others are confronted with the representation of her nudity, without her actually being naked. ORLAN highlights this same gap in public life, where others represent rather than present themselves. In this sense, performance acts on real space, disrupting the relationship with the other and making the encounter critical. ORLAN seeks to get closer to the environment, to objects that mediate encounters with the other, and to create by challenging and disrupting the law without condemning it.