TRANSHUMAN N°2

The solo exhibition BEING FLESH by Roy Köhnke (*1990*) explores the subjective body as the vessel of a person’s individuality and as an interface with the environment and the social sphere. Köhnke’s work revolves, among other things, around the question: How does our ‘host’—composed of nerves, bones and flesh—responds to the technological pressure to optimise imposed upon it by industry and science? Or how does the body interact with the system of enforcement dictated by politics? Underlying this tension is a functional image of the body that profoundly shapes society’s understanding of and approach to the body. But how has this image actually been constituted historically? Roy Köhnke draws artistic inspiration from the creation of this image of the body: from groundbreaking studies of proportion, including those by Michelangelo Buonarroti and Leonardo da Vinci (e.g. the ‘Vitruvian Man’), through fundamental scientific works on anatomy, such as Andreas Vesalius’ ‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem’, to the imaging techniques of modern medicine (X-ray, CT, ultrasound, MRI and nuclear medicine). Ever since Michel Foucault’s writings on biopolitics and Donna Haraway’s fundamental critique of so-called scientific ‘fact-making’, there has been a clear argument that the life sciences by no means take place in a neutral, purely fact-based space, but rather a) depend on the choice of methodology, the instruments used and the experimental design selected, and b) certainly have social implications, with power relations being inscribed into the research and its results. Ultimately, this can lead to science reinforcing social power relations rather than progressively questioning them on the basis of facts. Through his artistic methodology, Köhnke dismantles the dominant body ideal of Western modernity by not only radically broadening the field of vision regarding the human organism, but also by offering a new apparatus of vision. Through the interplay of research and methodology, radically alternative images and models of bodies and organs thus emerge. It is through this subject of the body that visitors can particularly well grasp these mechanisms. For people are connected to nothing as directly as to their own bodies, and usually desire nothing as much as other bodies. Consequently, interventions in this area often strike at the most sensitive points of social construction of a self. The eponymous site-specific work *BEING FLESH* (2023), which transforms the exhibition space into a kind of open body, is central to the exhibition and a fine example of the French sculptor’s approach: The installation consists of a series of architectural membranes through which the audience walks, and a series of flesh-like body sculptures that interact with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. The physical forms of the sculptures lie on the floor, whilst their fluid interiors – virtually reassembled and seemingly brought to life by the MRI scan – are made visible via a large projection onto a translucent membrane screen. The entire space, comprising both the structure and the projection, is acoustically animated and choreographed by an 20 min extract of a 90-minute soundtrack. Sound artist Unglee Izy generated this sound piece by using the data collected from the scanning process of the sculptures. The ‘essence’ of the amorphous bundles of flesh is thus represented in the three different states of sculpture / video / sound in a single space, allowing many interconnected aspects to unfold simultaneously before the audience. Other works by Köhnke also reveal the repressed “dysfunctions” of the ideal of a pure, operational bodily machine: uncontrolled exchange with foreign bodies and substances, free-flowing interactions with other species within an ecological network, degeneration, mutation, transformation into something else, hormonal surges, desire, fusions, regeneration and so much more. Areas that are difficult to predict and even harder to control, “like walks on the warm, dark and wild side” Köhnke condenses these intergenerative aspects, for example, in species-fusing anatomical drawings, in sprawling stainless steel assemblages that are both alluring and dangerous, in fragile plaster casts reminiscent of the whale’s fall, in artificial generated videos on cross-species reproduction, or in the many works yet to come. Given that particularly questionable currents within contemporary transhumanism focus primarily on the human body as the primary object of capitalistic optimisation, Roy Köhnke’s freely flourishing perspective is indispensable to the 2026 annual programme: TRANSHUMAN.