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The artist creates self-hybridizations in homage to women in history whom she admires because they defended causes that ORLAN supports in her life and work. Che pioneering women who paved the way for other women took risks that sometimes cost them their lives. Soten forgotten, erased or under-represented, ORLAN brings them back into the limelight with this series. The artist, as usual, breaks down the ice walls between artistic practices, genres, eras and skin tones. Chis gesture of hybridization with the other allows her to give them an artist’s kiss and create a meeting between women despite the mists of time that separate them. En reference to the great historical portraits, ORLAN prints these artists’ digital photomontages on canvas stretched and framed.

(Work in progess, other femmages are in production)

An orphaned Spanish artist born to a prostitute and heroin addict mother who abandoned him at birth, he questions this lack and absence in his work. Abel Azcona creates a new protocol in which he invites the great women of the art world who have inspired him for a series of duo photos. They don’t replace her mother, but represent a guide, a strong, emancipating feminine reference point. At the same time, it’s a tribute to the mothers of performance. Two generations meet, the historic artists and the new generation. Abel Azcona began this series in Amsterdam with Marina Abramovic, and is now continuing it in Paris with ORLAN.

On this occasion, ORLAN creates “L’éléphant de la forêt d’Afrique en voie de disparition et nouveaux robots en objets et matériaux recyclés”. This work is a continuation of the artist’s questioning of endangered animals, with the particularity that the elephant is hybridized with the skin of a leopard and lizard.

“Leather goods take us back to what we call “the beautiful hand”, but also to bags made of leather or animal skins (lizard, crocodile…). Today, we’re looking at all the materials we use, both natural and man-made, and their carbon footprint. My work questions the disappearance of certain animals and birds. I present these animals, which I hybridize with other animals in their natural environment, surrounded by robots. The robots are made from recycled objects. They are there to question the new technologies that can either destroy or build a more responsible world. “ORLAN

In these photos, ORLAN has recreated the materials and textures used by the unknown artists who inspired her creative process. They are mutant bodies emerging from the earth, from stone, from jade, many of them green, others red, symbolizing the importance of blood and sun for the Mayans. The yellow of the corn, the brown of the earth, the grey of the stone appear. There’s a meeting of two materialities: the concrete materials and digital pixels that ORLAN uses and injects into her works. The hybridization that most emancipates itself from Maya iconography is the one in jade stone: a mask of an anthropomorphic figure that sticks out its tongue, and is the big star of the museum. ORLAN inserted her eyes, her tongue and her blue wig.
The predominantly male Mayan statuary has been feminized by ORLAN’s face, and each portrait has a different age.

ORLAN decided to see what was going on by doing the same thing to the other side of humanity, reproducing the work, including its dimensions and frame, in photographic form. She then presented Jean-Christophe Bouvet, an actor who played in “Sous le soleil de Satan” with Gérard Depardieu, with his cock,  medium-sized and erect. ORLAN describes it as “the devil’s tail”. 

This feminist response questions the role of men and women in our society and how they are represented.

In 2022, in view of current events, ORLAN created a second version of “L’Origine de la guerre“, thirty years after the first, with a new model.

These recycled-object robots with ORLAN’s face can be seen in two ways: as destroyers and symbols of a dreaded future, or as protectors, standing by the animal’s side, accompanying the last survivors of their species towards a rethought future. Robots and new technologies question the link between the animal and human kingdoms. As much as these species left to their inexorable demise, the robots thus constructed are rebuses of modernity, made up of obsolete, abandoned and depreciated objects that ORLAN recycles to revalue them and create with humor.

Part of the series is materialized in the form of luminous tapestries printed on fiber optics, powered by an LED track system. They have been produced using technology developed by brochier® technologies.

ORLAN creates very abrupt digital collages in which she inserts fragments of her face: her eyes bulging out, her eyes askew, her ear upside down and her mouth screaming, showing her teeth ready to bite so that anger expresses itself in the work. This is a snapshot of that awareness. ORLAN is not putting Pablo Picasso or Dora Maar on trial, as they can no longer defend themselves, but rather expressing herself to the women of today who remain in the shadows: the inspirers, the models, the muses who played a major role in the fame of our great masters. It’s an incentive to emancipation. ORLAN tells them “stop being objects, become subjects. Emancipate yourselves, stop suffering, stop crying”.

ORLAN had his body scanned and then articulated so that he could perform all the acrobatics of the Peking Opera. With an artificial body, all distortions are conceivable; with a biological body, they are impossible. 

ORLAN has dressed her avatars and added tattoos that repeat the same motifs of hybridized photography. Each work of art has a different avatar, which comes out of the frame if you download the ARTI VIVE application and scan the work of art with it. 

You can then take photos of yourself, your friends and your avatar, and send them around the world just like any other selfie.

In his travel diaries, he paints the natives with respect, at a time when everyone considered them dirty, uncultured savages. He painted them in all their magnificence, in their ceremonial clothes, with their jewels and their superb feathers. ORLAN based her Self-hybridations amérindiennes series on these paintings and drawings. Of course, she transgressed their laws, as it was impossible for a woman to be a leader. ORLAN represents herself with jewelry forbidden to women, in particular that made from bear claws.

This series consists of a series of black and white photographs based on ethnographic photography, the first photos in which the Other is photographed. ORLAN also creates a few color works, as well as resin sculptures of mutant characters, notably exhibited at the 1999 Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art: “Partage d’exotismes”, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin.

In her series, ORLAN creates a manifesto work “Femme Surmas avec Labret et Visage de Femme Euro-Stéphanoise avec bigoudis” (Surmas Woman with Labret and Euro-Stephanoise Woman’s Face with Curlers), which demonstrates that beauty is merely a question of dominant ideology in a historical and geographical location. 

ORLAN presents a woman with a huge labret, very confident and sure of her ability to seduce, because in her tribe, the bigger the labret, the more desirable the woman. If we wore a labret here and now, in our Western culture, we would be designated by all as unbeatable monsters!

His trip to India was part of “le plan du film”, a series of works imagined from the reading of a quote by Jean-Luc Godard: “The only greatness of Jacques Becker’s Montparnasse 19 is that it is not only an upside-down film, but in a way the upside-down of cinema.” The concept was to take Godard literally, to create an upside-down film, starting with the poster and promotion with the trailer, letrilles, a soundtrack and a TV show to launch the feature. ORLAN enlisted the help of Publidécor, an advertising agency specializing in 1950s painted movie posters, to create fourteen painted posters based on photos of the artist and recycled works. Her intention with these hand-painted acrylic posters on 3 m x 2 m canvases was to tell the story of her life in art. ORLAN made the posters using the names of her friends in the art world at the time, and one or two names of movie stars to make it seem as if the film existed. She also staged a fake press conference with director Bigas Luna and curator Lorand Hegyi for a Valencia biennial. She invited a number of journalists to talk about a film she had made that didn’t really exist.

On others she poses with one or more multicolored ballets in dynamic gestures, and in the last she stages herself with post-operative bandages and false blues.

The installation of the work, inspired by Thomas McEvilley’s Art and Discontent-Theory at the Millenium, features a motion detector that triggers a recording of ORLAN repeating the phrase “Would you care for some content, Mr. Greenberg?”.

For her first series, the artist hybridizes with pre-Columbian cultures, with over thirty works, some inspired by the skull deformations found among pre-Columbians, Africans, Egyptians and Merovingians! The Vierge à l’Enfant (Virgin and Child) from Rabastens attests to this, showing both the Virgin and Child with a deformed, elongated skull. 

In her work, ORLAN has sought to break away from Western references and stereotypes of beauty, creating this first series using digital photography and interactive 3D video installations based on skull deformities, squinting, nose jobs known to the Mayas, Olmecs and Aztecs, and representations of the god Xipe Totec.

The “Exogène” exhibition, created by Bruno Guiganti and Morten Salling, took the form of a multi-part criminal investigation and identity quest. Works created by ORLAN using her own blood and flesh have been submitted to  the Danish forensic police for sequencing to verify whether they were created by the same artist. Sequencing analysis proved that they had indeed been produced by ORLAN. These works were a reliquary with flesh in the center and a St suaires soaked in ORLAN’s blood.

This fiction within a fiction spread throughout Copenhagen. Wanted posters featuring ORLAN were then put up all over the city, and a skull supposedly found by the art center was handed over to the criminal investigation department to find out if it might belong to her.

Traces of this investigation (works by ORLAN, fingerprints, DNA sequencing, wanted notices, skulls, etc.) were then exhibited in the desecrated Nikolaj Church, transformed into an art center.

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.

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.

ORLAN has captured the “in-between”, i.e. the exact image of the environment conceived from her face hybridized with a portrait of one of her art-historical reference figures, without retouching.

At the top, on the other side of the diptych, ORLAN used magnets to place the image of the day, a self-portrait made by the MACHINE-CORPS, of a face first with bandages, then with colors: from blue to yellow to red, the whole quite swollen. A metal plate was installed between these two images, engraved with the words: entre-deux and the day’s date.

By the last day, the installation was complete and so was the exhibition.

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.

Among the medical team and the STUDIO ORLAN team, there was a woman specializing in sign language for the deaf and hard of hearing, and this character was there to remind us that we are all deaf and hard of hearing at certain times. His presence in the operating theatre was a display of body language. She was assisted by Raphaël Cuir, videographer Tom Klinkowstein, who handled the satellite transmission, Sophie Thompson, who took care of the English translation, and Connie Chung, the famous star broadcaster of the time, who asked to be in the operating room with ORLAN and did a full report on the CNN evening news at 8pm. She came to France to attend ORLAN’s wedding to Raphaël Cuir in Sologne. 

During this mythical operation, ORLAN had solid silicone implants placed on her cheekbones to enhance them on both sides of her forehead. The idea was to create an operation that wouldn’t bring beauty but, on the contrary, undesirability and monstrosity. ORLAN wanted to demonstrate that beauty is a dictate of the dominant ideology in a geographical and historical point in time. These bumps have become organs of seduction. ORLAN says “it’s my convertible”. 

Thanks to Christian Vanderborght, this performance was broadcast live via satellite to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Mac Luhan Centre in Toronto, the Banff Multimedia Centre, Canada, Belgium, Germany, Latvia, Japan, the Netherlands, New York, Santa Monica and in France to Nice and Lyon. Spectators from all over the world were able to watch the operation and ask questions, which ORLAN answered live as soon as the surgical procedure allowed. Participants in the satellite transmission at the Centre Georges Pompidou included Gladys Fabre, Jean-Paul Fargier, Christian Vanderborght and François Barré, President of the Centre, among others.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To escape the father’s territory, you have to change your skin. ORLAN then decided to experiment with new, multiple forms, in a humorous, distanced vein. ORLAN is in favor of shifting, mutant, nomadic identities, not fixed ones.

In this series, ORLAN has a different outfit for each photo, as well as a hat ranging from a kepi to a mitre, a cap and a donkey’s head.

Joël Savary, the director of the Centre D’Hérouville Saint-Clair who had invited him for a major exhibition, posed disguised as a garage mechanic with a huge 12″ wrench positioned in his trouser pocket to imitate an erection. He holds ORLAN’s skirt while she is elevated on an elevator. After this series, ORLAN never used Judeo-Christian iconography again.

ORLAN decided to see what was going on by doing the same thing to the other side of humanity, reproducing the work, including its dimensions and frame, in photographic form. She then presented Jean-Christophe Bouvet, an actor who played in “Sous le soleil de Satan” with Gérard Depardieu, with his cock,  medium-sized and erect. ORLAN describes it as “the devil’s tail”. 

This feminist response questions the role of men and women in our society and how they are represented.

In 2022, in view of current events, ORLAN created a second version of “L’Origine de la guerre“, thirty years after the first, with a new model.

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.

The artist manipulates a number of accessories such as white crosses, black crosses, white easels, black easels, glass balls… She assumes real building materials, cinder blocks, while the background of the work is made up of imitation plastic bricks painted yellow, so the real “and” the fake rub shoulders without clashing. 

ORLAN levitates on a video screen with the digital images of our time, while citing the marble sculptures of another era. In this series, ORLAN emphasizes that there is no dichotomy between today’s digital images and the images of folded sculptures quoting Bernini. The white and black Madonnas are draped in skai, a faux leather that looks like marble when lit, evoking Baroque drapery. ORLAN has created a link between the “old” and the “new” through this photographic series, showing different times in the same space-time. She has blended a religious vocabulary with a secular plastic vocabulary to highlight the underlying sensuality of religious iconography, taking into account the lesson of the Baroque, which does not ask us to choose between good “or” evil. The Baroque shows us Bernini’s Saint Theresa enjoying the angel’s arrow in an erotic, ecstatic ecstasy. Lacan talked a lot about it.

The artist manipulates a number of accessories such as white crosses, black crosses, white easels, black easels, glass balls… She assumes real building materials, cinder blocks, while the background of the work is made up of imitation plastic bricks painted yellow, so the real “and” the fake rub shoulders without clashing. 

ORLAN levitates on a video screen with the digital images of our time, while citing the marble sculptures of another era. In this series, ORLAN emphasizes that there is no dichotomy between today’s digital images and the images of folded sculptures quoting Bernini. The white and black Madonnas are draped in skai, a faux leather that looks like marble when lit, evoking Baroque drapery. ORLAN has created a link between the “old” and the “new” through this photographic series, showing different times in the same space-time. She has blended a religious vocabulary with a secular plastic vocabulary to highlight the underlying sensuality of religious iconography, taking into account the lesson of the Baroque, which does not ask us to choose between good “or” evil. The Baroque shows us Bernini’s Saint Theresa enjoying the angel’s arrow in an erotic, ecstatic ecstasy. Lacan talked a lot about it.

On the last day of installation before demolition, ORLAN uses the elements, in particular the columns, to create perspectives for a grand performance. ORLAN put out a call through the press for young children to appear in the performance. On the day of the show, ORLAN had the children’s families sign image rights, and dressed them up as putti, loves and cherubs with little white wings, masks, bows and long trumpets…ORLAN herself was dressed as a Madonna covered in peacock feathers and little white feathers. 

The artist stood high up on a mobile podium, which she moved aside to let the children pass, simulating a metaphorical childbirth. She also had a very large effigy articulated like a puppet with which she played and made children play.

ORLAN took many photos that were used for installations projected onto the ceilings. Antenne 2 was also filming with Jacques Martins.

In the installation, the entrance was decorated with artistically draped hangings topped by a black-and-white photo of Sein unique, Monstration phallique. Once inside, visitors were confronted with a personal theater made up of real, artificial and virtual 3D elements: a resin statue of Saint Orlan, a single bare breast and a finger raised to the sky, plastic flowers mixed with lilies and arums, a hologram representing an angel, live doves. Real and fake marble plaques and photographs of ORLAN as a madonna were placed on the floor in front of the statue, and a series of columns from the Opéra de Lyon formed a semicircle around it. Behind the statue, she had placed a large halo of mirrors, in fact a video monitor showing the space and part of her sculpted face, accentuating the perspective effect created by the combination of architectural elements. The title refers to her own ironic canonization, her appropriation of the role of the Saint and her own designation of a place for this cult.

ORLAN had to undergo emergency surgery. While waiting for the ambulance, she still had time to get her team on board to film and photograph her operation. The video cassettes were then taken one by one to the festival, and the operation was screened at the FNAC as if it were a programmed performance. ORLAN has always thought of life as a reusable aesthetic phenomenon, and this was an obvious choice. This operation was decisive in his career.

On the occasion of her residency at the Getty Research Institute in 2007, ORLAN asked the eminent researchers in residence with her that year to give her a book, or the title of a book that had most influenced their thinking, their work, their lives. The artist placed them all on a large granite block at the entrance, where the words “Getty Research Institute” were engraved, then lay down next to the books, and asked someone to remove the ones sticking out of her body. After measuring them with her body, ORLAN read them continuously, annotating them. ORLAN carried out this performance several times in her life, in different places and circumstances, a performance of the body to the corpus of the book.

On the occasion of her residency at the Getty Research Institute in 2007, ORLAN asked the eminent researchers in residence with her that year to give her a book, or the title of a book that had most influenced their thinking, their work, their lives. The artist placed them all on a large granite block at the entrance, where the words “Getty Research Institute” were engraved, then lay down next to the books, and asked someone to remove the ones sticking out of her body. After measuring them with her body, ORLAN read them continuously, annotating them. ORLAN carried out this performance several times in her life, in different places and circumstances, a performance of the body to the corpus of the book.

With this gesture, ORLAN invites the other to become ORLAN and allows herself to resemble the other. The artist distances herself from the other, while at the same time drawing closer to them. Artist and guest step outside their own frame. 

ORLAN has visited several of a participant’s apartments to see if the clothes are in keeping with her place of residence, and continues to exchange ideas with the Other.

In 1980, ORLAN travelled to Italy to study the Baroque and understand this aversion. This study trip enabled him to identify works of great importance in the history of art. The Baroque has been a major source of inspiration for ORLAN, who has  worked on this theme for over ten years in her major series Etude Documentaire: le Drapé-le Baroque.

Judeo-Christian culture asks us to choose between good “or” evil. The Baroque invited the artist to reflect on this “or” and to use the “and”: good “and” evil, for in Bernini’s work, which inspired her so much, he shows us St. Teresa enjoying the angel’s arrow in an ecstatic “and” erotic ecstasy. Jacques Lacan wrote a great deal about this in his book Encore. 

Most of his works are based on this Baroque lesson.

On the other, a life-size black-and-white photograph of her torso, with a flashing red lamp positioned at breast level, and an arrow pointing to the slit where the five-franc coin could be seen falling down a transparent plastic esophagus to a pubis of the same nature. The performance lasted 30 minutes, and 17 participants had the privilege of buying an artist’s kiss.

It took place at the Grand Palais and for this sum, ORLAN gave a real artist’s kiss, not a childish one, but a real one. french kiss… The result was a huge media scandal, so much so that the international contemporary art fair has never had so many press articles classified not as “FIAC” but as “baiser de l’artiste”. ORLAN has also been invited to appear on numerous television platforms.

As a result, ORLAN was fired from the school where she was teaching to train socio-cultural animators. Her students immediately went on strike, creating songs in praise of the “artist’s kiss” and to her glory, demanding that she be reinstated, which never happened… 

What followed was a terrible period when she had no money, no place to sleep and no food to eat. She lost her studio and many of her works because they had been sealed off. 

ORLAN finally passed a competitive examination to become a teacher at a fine arts school in Dijon, and there were several happy endings. The sculpture was purchased by a public collection, the FRAC des Pays de la Loire. This work has traveled all over the world, including the United States in the Wak exhibition, and was requested by FIAC for its 30th anniversary. It was displayed at the glass-protected entrance, and on the large wall was written “Le Baiser de l’artiste l’oeuvre qui a le plus impactée l’histoire de la FIAC”.

ORLAN en Grande Odalisque d’Ingres is a black and white photograph from the Tableaux vivants series (1977-78), a counterpart to the famous painting by Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres. Stand-alone extract from a major installation presented on the occasion of the Tendances contemporaines exhibition (1977) at the Espace Lyonnais d’Art Contemporain. The photograph was reproduced in different formats, arranged in the space under increasingly large pillows, one the exact size of the Ingres painting, the other the size of ORLAN’s body, and 2 others that exceeded the size of the body and were out of all proportion. 

Made from the sheets of the trousseau and meant to be the physical representation of the one photographed, pillows and photographs were hung with butcher’s hooks and plastic ears from the four corners of the pillows, winking playfully at the pillow confidences. ORLAN’s aim with this installation was to question the notion of scale inherent in the photographic medium, and to question the stereotypical female accessories of Ingres’ painting.

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.

There was also a sign with the prices of the parts of her body where it was written “does my body belong to me?”. “guaranteed pure ORLAN with no colorants or preservatives”.

The aim was to question the way in which fragmentary representation transforms our relationship with reality. This issue of objectification and body fragmentation raises questions about the right to dispose of one’s body in relation to the historical and social context, and the right to sell the representation of one’s body when selling one’s body is forbidden.

The concept is to illustrate how reading has enabled the artist to stand up straight, to speak loud and clear, with content thanks to knowledge. This approach enabled him to emancipate himself from his often poorly-educated working-class social class, and reach a higher cultural and intellectual level. This is the beginning of its internal reconstruction.

The second series, ORLAN standing in her book straitjacket, shows how reading causes pain and prevents the body from moving. ORLAN presents herself with a wooden structure that she wears like a body prosthesis, to which she has glued books. This gesture shows the weight of reading on the body, on the shoulders.

By adopting these postures, ORLAN tackles the cultural representations that have an impact on the attitude, space and role adopted by women, as well as the determinism of parental formatting, while questioning Judeo-Christian iconography.

The image of the sublimated, disembodied, iconic woman collides with the artist’s body.

ORLAN has entitled several of her series “strip-tease” because she believes that striptease is impossible for women, as they are clothed in fantasies, comparisons anda priori, which are the clothes they can’t take off.

ORLAN  has used sheets to stretch them like a canvas on a stretcher, dressed up as a virgin and a madonna, but has also carried her sheets to her lovers’ homes to ejaculate in specific places on the sheets. Following this gesture, she took a seamstress’s tambourine to stretch the sheet over the site of the semen stain, which she had spotted with a wash to make the stain as visible as possible. Then ORLAN embroidered the sheets with a very large needle and thick black thread. This performance was performed in different versions, sometimes blindfolded, sometimes looking at the audience or with eyes closed. The result was a very rough embroidery that his mother would not have liked at all.

Based on this performance, ORLAN created an installation of 7 photos, framed on one side by a poetic text “reminiscence of maternal discourse” and on the other, the seamstress’s tambourine with the sperm stain. This piece was purchased by FNAC.

She has also produced several pieces, sometimes in triptychs with the text in the middle and two mirrored photos, and sometimes with single photos presented separately.