Modern Body Festival 2014: Art as research through experience

What exactly is the ‘modern body’? We are inclined to think of our bodies as limited to what is contained within our own skin, but technology, philosophy, spirituality, religion, and science all challenge this idea.

Modern Body Festival (MBF), an intermedia initiative organized by artists / makers / performers Stephanie Pan and Stelios Manousakis, strives to examine the nature of our current existence, as it were, through the perspective of the ‘modern body’. We regard the project’s curatorial aspect, but also its production, as an art-work and architectural project in its own right, whose role is to support an artistic vision that supercedes our own individual practices: it is about raw, physical and intimate experience, built as a multi-layered, organic whole.

Our first edition explored how we perceive our bodies – viscerally, psychologically, vicariously. It took place in October 2014 at the former Europol building in Den Haag as a full-day event with site-specific installations, video art, film, music, and sound, interactive and intermedia/multimedia installations, a lecture-performance and live intermedia performances.

Our second edition, Modern Body Festival meets DEZACT 2016: I/WE/THEY, explores the social body; how we exist and belong in today’s globalized society. For this edition, we collaborate with cutting-edge Taiwanese architecture platform DEZACT, to create a 5-day event made up of workshops, exhibitions, symposia and performances.