Preposterous Flesh

‘Preposterous Flesh’ is a direct intervention into the advertisement structures built into Birmingham city such as electronic poster boards, flags/ banners and billboards. These are situated on New Street, Bull Street, Chamberlain Square, Smallbrook Queensway, Ethel Street and in New Street Station. These areas are specifically chosen due to the large footfall of everyday commuters and tourists. The piece(s) are viewed by people who are forced to see the work rather than finding the work, subverting the use of advertisement strategies.

The piece(s) highlight how we as living beings interact with the City of Birmingham, the gentrification has caused commercialisation to be prevalent. Advertisements indoctrinate us on money making idealised beauty standards; then give us cosmetic surgery option to alter and adapt our look that becomes a viral trend. Fat is seen as foreign and shameful but silicone to replicate fat is idealised. The complex beauty standards we navigate lead us to become a part of the artificial world.

We are no longer living organisms who see fat as a source of warmth, we are on a mission to eradicate it from all beings. We are shrinking and in doing so being further oppressed.

‘Preposterous Flesh’ realises the concept of contemporary commercialisation of the beauty industry and its oppressive schemes, and protests against it. The fragmentation of the body gets the viewer to question the stability of their own body, drawing upon the abject to explore matter out of place.

The imagery consists of two queer fat bodies digitally entangled and embed with artificial colours. These images are then repeated to symbolise the repetitive process of the beauty industry’s use of business schemes. The framing of the image is absent, the flesh is cut off at the boarder of the paper, then framed by the mechanism it is displayed within. This directly references the aesthetic interventions on nature (infrastructures placed in the city) that are parallel to those interventions on the body.