The representation of suffering has long been a cornerstone of art history. From the agonized torsions of Laocoön in ancient Greek sculpture, to Christ’s crucified body in Renaissance altarpieces, to the ecstatic martyrdoms of the Baroque, pain was not only depicted—it was idealized. These bodies were not merely broken; they were aestheticized into instruments of truth, devotion, transcendence. Today, in the wake of wars, digital transformation, and bio-surveillance, a new generation of artists reclaims the body not as a symbol of sacrifice, but also as an interface of memory, resistance, and becoming. As Boris Groys notes in his “Philosophy of Care,’ medical systems and social structures reduce care to “repair”—restoring the body to productivity, ensuring the smooth functioning of society. Against this logic, the works in this selection stage a different relation to the body: one that embraces fragility, ritual, and excess. This curatorial program explores how overcoming and transcending physical limits connects us to each other and to the world around us. Its structure draws from four intertwined ideas: pain as Excess; thresholds as spaces of personal and collective passage; Ritual as Resistance and the expanded “social body,” encompassing cyborgs, augmented selves, and posthuman subjectivities in media art. 1. The Body as Challenge and Excess Józef Robakowski’s “My Videomasochism” stands as a razor-sharp critique of Polish postwar identity, masculinity, and the absurd heroics of the socialist body politic. Filmed in 1989, on the edge of systemic collapse, Robakowski uses his own face as a battleground—slapping, stabbing, and smearing it with tools in front of the camera. It is both an act of defiance and complicity, exposing how violence becomes internalized under ideological pressure. The artist casts himself as victim, executioner, and medium—revealing the grotesque theatricality of national mythologies and the vulnerability of the individual within them. Stelarc, by contrast, rewires the body not to critique history but to undo biology itself. His “Third Hand” and “Exoskeletonare” are not prosthetics, but autonomous agents—robotic extensions activated by electrical impulses from his stomach and legs. These technologies do not simply augment the body; they alienate it from itself. Stelarc performs a posthuman philosophy where intention, agency, and identity are redistributed across skin, code, and machine. In his work, the human form is not sacrosanct—it is obsolete, a platform for experimental redesign. Marco Donnarumma, inheriting the provocations of both Robakowski and Stelarc, takes these explorations into the realm of AI and affect. In “Eingeweide,” he merges biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and visceral sound into a brutal liturgy of rupture. The human body becomes a node in a recursive system of feedback—leaking, twitching, reprogramming itself on stage. Together, these three artists push the body to, and beyond, its thresholds: from political resistance to physiological reengineering, from self-mockery to synthetic communion. 2. The Body as Archive of Violence Regina José Galindo emerged in post-conflict Guatemala, where silence reigned over decades of genocide. In “Siren” she offers herself as a conduit for voices that were silenced—those of the disappeared, the raped, the unnamed. The body here becomes not just an archive, but a battlefield where systemic violence is made visible, immediate, and undeniable. Galindo’s work does not aestheticize pain—it weaponizes presence. The artist invites the viewer not to admire, but to confront, to reckon. Katarzyna Kozyra navigates the cultural debris of post-communist identity through gender-bending performances that unsettle norms. She challenges gender binaries through staged metamorphoses, embodying opera divas and castrati in playful, violent transgressions. Often it is the naked body that seems to convince you that you can be whoever you want, to embrace any identity, blurring all boundaries. The most common themes in her work are fluidity and change. Jemima Burilli, turns to the domestic sphere, laying bare the invisible violences of everyday life. Her intimate tableaux invert traditional power dynamics—making the private political, and the familiar unsettling. 3. The Body as Ritual and Resistance If the Renaissance and Baroque eras glorified suffering as a path to transcendence—transforming wounds into symbols of divine grace—then ORLAN turns that paradigm inside out. Through her concept of carnal art, she reclaims the body not as a passive site of martyrdom, but as an active terrain of feminist resistance and aesthetic reprogramming. Her surgical performances—deliberately staged as public rituals—confront Western ideals of beauty and sanctity, drawing from Catholic iconography, classical sculpture, and cosmetic surgery to expose how deeply control over the female body is embedded in art history. As she asserts, “The body is political,” and her work insists on making the body not suffer, but speak. Body, altered and amplified, is not sacrificed but re-authored. This act of self-(re)creation is echoed by artists such as Monika Mamzeta, who marks her post-mastectomy body with a collaboratively designed tattoo, reclaiming personal trauma through collective ritual. In Mónica Rikić’s project Somoure, ritual care is reimagined through experimental robotics. Developed in collaboration with the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (IRI CSIC-UPC) in Barcelona, Somoure approaches assistive care robots not as neutral tools, but as cultural agents embedded in societal expectations and intimate dynamics. The work resists techno-solutionist thinking, reframing robotics as part of a complex web of desires, ethics, and embodied relations. Rather than solving care, Rikić performs it—materializing questions of autonomy, interdependence, and vulnerability within the human-machine entanglement. Similarly, Ameena Aljerman Alali revives familial myths and ancestral gestures, blurring the lines between spiritual inheritance and digital longing. In Elizabeta di Sopra’s delicate video works, the intimate acts of care—washing, touching, holding—become a form of silent resistance, where presence itself defies erasure. A haunting interlude arrives with Lakeside Picnic by Louis-Cyprien Rials. Immersing himself in the radioactive waters of Lake Chagan, Rials confronts the scars of nuclear ambition—not to glorify trauma, but to inhabit its silence. His drying body on poisoned ground is not sacrificial, but definitely present, evoking Tarkovsky and La Jetée in a meditation on what endures in the aftermath. 4. Posthuman Imaginaries and Fragile Futures In response to planetary precarity and digital saturation, artist Valentin Ranger constructs a Meta Hospital for digital hybrids, where gender, form, and function mutate fluidly. He imagines posthuman hospitals for unstable bodies. His “Meta Hospital” reconfigures care as nonlinear, intimate, and glitch-prone. Clara Lemercier Gemptel in “SOMA” resurrects the voices of exploited workers through spectral figures moving in abandoned landscapes—haunted choreographies of late capitalism. All presented in my program works speak from across regions and stories, but they converge on one proposition: the body is not simply what we are, but how we know, suffer, and change. They reject the ideology of optimization. Instead, they offer rupture as method, tenderness as resistance, and the mutated body as a site for rethinking care beyond utility. Through scars, circuits, rituals, and murmurs, these artists rewire the social body—offering visions of connection across the very thresholds where we once broke apart.