THE PRE-POSTHUMAN BODY

THE PRE-POSTHUMAN BODY Feeling Emotions: moving images that move you, performances that touch you. AES+F, Stefano Cagol, Cao Yu, Isaac Chong Wai, Nezaket Ekici, Thomas Eller, Christian Jankowski, Mariana Hahn, Gülsün Karamustafa, Shahar Marcus, Kate McMillan, Björn Melhus, Almagul Menlibayeva, Nina E. Schönefeld, Mariana Vassileva, Liao Wenfeng, Zhou Xiaohu Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch For CIFRA's season on The Body: Any Body Knows Entering the second quarter of the 21st century, we find ourselves entangled in the paradox of having already exceeded ourselves. We live in an age of “post-everything”: postmodern, postcolonial, postindustrial, postdigital. Our cultural and technological discourses are increasingly shaped by what lies “after”, even as the foundations of the “before” remain unresolved. Among the most pervasive and potent of these concepts is the “posthuman”: a speculative condition in which the boundaries between human and machine, organic and synthetic, real and virtual, self and other, are increasingly blurred or altogether erased. The posthuman exists as both spectre and promise — an ambiguous space where the logic of progress intersects with existential dread. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, surveillance systems, and algorithmic governance all offer a glimpse of a world in which the human body, as we once knew it, may become obsolete or reprogrammable. And yet, in the breathless adulation of technological advancement, something vital is being forgotten: the very definitions of what it means to be human. The Pre-Posthuman Body is a curated program of video and performance art that reclaims this forgotten space. Rather than imagining the “beyond-human” as a purely technological fantasy, it asks us to return — urgently, critically, and tenderly — to the human body in all its glorious viscerality. Not a singular, idealized body, but the body in all its multiplicity: physical, vulnerable, political, gendered, performative, aging, sensual, wounded, ecstatic. Here, the body is not only a vessel of life, but a contested site of identity, labor, memory, and resistance. Through a selection of works by 17 contemporary artists from Bulgaria, China, Germany, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, working across video art and performance, the selection maps the contours of corporeal experience at a time when embodiment itself is increasingly abstracted, mediated, and disembodied. These works investigate the body not as a fixed or neutral form, but as a shifting and unstable archive of experiences, feelings, memories, and meanings. They offer moments of friction between material presence and virtual absence; between the biological and the technological; between the intimate and the alienating. In this context, The Pre-Posthuman Body proposes a critical counter-narrative to the dominant techno-utopian or techno-dystopian imaginaries. It resists the notion that the future lies solely in transcending the body, and instead insists on the continued urgency of inhabiting the body — feeling it, performing it, questioning it, pushing its boundaries. The works in the program take up the body as a space of longing, mourning, joy, struggle, and transformation. They explore themes including gender fluidity and the performance of identity; the relationship between the body and state control; the traces of trauma in muscle and gesture; and the poetics of touch in a world where increasingly we touch our keypads and screens more than one another. The title The Pre-Posthuman Body gestures to a temporal disjuncture. It points to the liminal state we now occupy: no longer tethered to humanist certainties, yet not fully severed from them either. We exist, perhaps, in a speculative moment before the full arrival of the posthuman — a moment in which the future is not predetermined, but actively contested through embodied practices. This is not a nostalgic return to the “natural” human body, nor is it a rejection of technological mediation. Rather, it is a reckoning with the complex interrelations between flesh and code, instinct and programming, presence and simulation, fragility and power. Ultimately, this program is a celebration — albeit a critical one — of the body in all its pre-posthuman viscerality. It is a call to feel the pains and pleasures of embodiment, to reclaim the textures of skin and bone, breath and sweat, voice and silence. At a time when the body is being displaced by data, flattened into avatars, and commodified as content, The Pre-Posthuman Body insists on the enduring power of the corporeal: to move, to resist, to grieve and rejoice, to desire, to remember, to imagine, and to laugh. For is not humor the most human of characteristics?