In a world where CCTV cameras record all manner of public life, private images are ceaselessly uploaded to social media, deep fakes abound, and digital avatars can simulate human behaviour with increasing accuracy, our understanding of the body is progressively harder to separate from digital life. In Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s provocative and unsettling work, the ways these forms of photographic, televisual, and digital media impact our perceptions of ourselves is brought into sharp focus. Hansen’s work fixates on the amassment of capital created through the gendering of bodies, especially in the field of pornography. The video Maintenancer (2018), made in collaboration with filmmaker Therese Henningsen, focuses on the maintenance of sex dolls at a German doll brothel, presenting viewers in direct confrontation with women’s bodies as they are crafted and idealised for consumption, and the work of conservation involved in preserving their appearance. Many of Hansen’s sculptures follow a similar logic to her digitally rendered dolls: Daddy Mould (2018), the empty fibreglass mould of a silicon sex doll and Untitled (Sex Robot) (2018–2019), a ball-jointed wooden marionette, each reference human physical functionality but nonetheless maintain their commodity status. Like the technologised bodies in Hansen’s videos, art, sex, and product are closely linked.
Madeline Weisburg
