FEATURES: Vienna Face Project: Laboratory of the Senses

In this project, contemporary practices of portraying are examined. These are not limited to artistic forms. Furthermore biomedical depictions of the face and surgical techniques will be included in the research framework. Based on the self-portraiture or the presentation of the self in everyday life, we investigate the human expressive potential. Portraits of artists are confronted with those of handicapped persons who are confined in their facial expressiveness, and decided to get their mimic disabilities treated in plastic surgery. Artists use different strategies to grapple with issues of the body image. Works of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Oskar Kokoschka, Hermann Heller, Arnulf Rainer, Kurt Kren, Günter Brus and Maria Lassnig are sources of inspiration as well as aesthetic subjects of our investigation. We develop a sensory approach, which shall be combined with ethnographic methods of observation. A laboratory situation is created, a workshop where cross- disciplinary research is performed to the discursive threads of how we become "other" and how it feels to live in our society with a physical defacement. A pilot study with facial paralyzed patients will be conducted. Methodologically Body Art related approaches are combined with visual and sensory anthropology and with analyses of the cultural history of portraiture. The video camera is used as bodily prosthesis. Close-up images, for instance, create a proximity to the faces and bodies of others that we hardly experience in daily life. Cinematic images transcend the common conventions of social distance. The film subjects are intimately exposed and the private view is intermingled with the public spectacle. Biographic interviews among artists, patients and surgeons complement the mix of mainly audiovisual methods. In this test arrangement, the portrait is defined as a temporally situation and as such embedded in a context of societal and political acting. Portraying is understood as a performative act. The interactions between physical deformations and the recreation of a model-like mimic are rendered visible as a cultural interface. The following practices are brought into play and interwoven: video portraitures and diagnostic tests, self-experiments and face surgeries, autopathographies and therapeutic exercises of the mimic features. In a multidisciplinary sense lab the expressiveness of the human face will be depicted in its permanent transition between disfiguration and reconstruction. We aim at developing a corporeal vocabulary of how the ways in which being facially or otherwise deformed changes one`s feeling of subjectivity.

We use our face to express ourselves. The artistic research work Features: Vienna Face Project (2010 2014) focused on four children whose expressive ability was partly impaired by facial paralysis. The girls and boys who were operated on by the plastic and reconstructive surgeon Manfred Frey who works in Vienna, received support during the treatment. They were given a video camera to take home with them to film their social setting but also themselves. The process they made after their surgical procedures was extensively documented by means of video and photography while they were doing their exercises. Shared purpose of this rich multifaceted project, which combines the approaches of body art, choreography and of dance as well as the visual and sensory anthropology is an opening in respect of content of both therapy and art that is immediately related with concrete practices. Therefore therapeutic and arts based methods are brought face to face in an unconventional way, a sensitive endeavor that reveals vulnerability and intimacy. A common language exemplary in the encounters of the plastic surgeon Manfred Frey and the facially paralyzed children and their families was being developed.The unusual research undertaking brings together artistic and scientific methodologies. The project was conceptualized and realized in close collaboration with Manfred Frey. The Austrian artist Elke Silvia Krystufek and video artist and filmmaker Artur Zmijewski who lives in Warsaw advised me while I was elaborating the concrete work steps. Together with the art historian and performer Tamar Tembeck (Montreal, Canada), numerous publications, a participation in an exhibition as well as a choreography with the title Equations (2012) evolved. The choreographic work was developed in New York City (NYC, USA) together with dancer, theater director and movement trainer Selma Trevino. An important source of inspiration for this was Franz Xaver Messerschmidts Charakterköpfe (Character Heads) from the 18th century, which we used in a three-day workshop together with the childrens exercise material, applying this to the entire body. Human expression cannot be reduced to the face. People use their entire body to express themselves. We speak with our hands, distance ourselves or move closer to things or people. We articulate our feelings in different ways and appear in various guises.www.corporealities.org