SPECTRUM GHOST SPECULUM / 2021


medical steel

Part of the project was presented at the exhibition of the finalists of the Nova art Contest 8 «New Skin: the Myth of a Technological Body». The project will be further developed and presented in 2022.



Spectrum Ghost Speculum is a project in which I develop my research into medicine, healing techniques and diagnosis of body malfunctions, time and the limits of corporeality. 

The sculptural series of polished surgical instruments is a fantasy on the theme of the Out-of-place artefact, an impossible object in terms of the chronology of evolution. Such objects could be found in the future during excavations of the 2000s, perhaps after the Anthropocene. I imagine the ghost who saw all the technology before us and in our lifetime, we gaze together at what will be created in the future. Surgical instruments are like magic wands, only the spellbook is lost somewhere.

The process of polishing to me is an interaction with a technology that has not changed in centuries and which may soon disappear or take on a new form. Like laser surgery which has partly replaced surgery with classic instruments - some surgical interventions can already be replaced by pharmacological therapy today. As Annemarie Mol writes in her book «The Body Multiple» about the construction of atherosclerosis in Hospital Z.

In this project I have focused on surgical retractors (speculums) – mechanical structures that fix the edges of the skin for surgery and visual inspection, being frames for body orifice. A speculum is an extended spectrum mirror that shifts the boundaries, identification and position of the body in space.