Orlan

Orlan (b. 1947, Saint-Étienne, France) is a French artist who lives and works between Paris, Los Angeles, and New York. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and at the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, and has taught at the École nationale supérieure d'art de Dijon and in the United States.

From the early 1960s she developed a performance practice that placed her own body at the center of investigations into identity, representation, femininity, and the relationship between flesh and image. Her most radical project, The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN (1990–93), consisted of nine surgical performances — conducted under local anesthesia, with the operating theater decorated and the surgeon costumed, while Orlan read philosophical and literary texts — in which her face was surgically altered to incorporate features taken from canonical Western representations of beauty (the chin of Botticelli's Venus, the nose of Psyche, the forehead of the Mona Lisa). The operations were filmed and broadcast live as performance events. She named this practice Carnal Art — art that uses the body as material and surgery as a medium. Subsequent work has developed the concept of Self-Hybridations, combining her digitally altered face with pre-Columbian, African, and other non-Western standards of beauty to interrogate Eurocentric norms. Her work is held by the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim, and major collections internationally.