E:MU
BODY OF WORK: MEAT, 2023
In a clinically clean environment, the human body is stripped of its identity. Through the deliberate omission of the head—the very faculty that supposedly makes us human—the subject collapses into a mere object. What remains is an anonymous, sculpturally molded torso, radically divested of its dignity. Existence is reduced to its sheer physical presence: an amorphous lump of meat.
Violent red splatters shatter the sterile silence of this staging, forcing the gaze upon raw biological finitude. Against the mercilessly clean backdrop, the deep red unleashes a drastic visual impact. It marks the final transition from an animated individual to naked matter. The work rejects any idealizing formal aesthetics, ruthlessly confronting us instead with our own animalistic banality.
“The alienation of the body to its bare materiality.”
© 2023 Edin Mustafic – Meat
Work note, Vienna 2023:
The decision to stage the headless body in highly sculptural poses deliberately strips the subject of its humanity. Without a head, the contorted, flesh-colored form almost inevitably evokes associations with a plucked chicken—a calculated, cynical irritation. The almost sterile setting serves as a clean laboratory in which the red blood splatters resonate all the more loudly as brutal proof of our corporeality.
The decision to stage the headless body in highly sculptural poses deliberately strips the subject of its humanity. Without a head, the contorted, flesh-colored form almost inevitably evokes associations with a plucked chicken—a calculated, cynical irritation. The almost sterile setting serves as a clean laboratory in which the red blood splatters resonate all the more loudly as brutal proof of our corporeality.