Incarnation of the Body Politic, The Armory Show, 2018
At The Armory Show, 2018, Lawrie Shabibi presented a new body of work by Shahpour Pouyan as part of the Focus section, curated by Gabriel Ritter, Curator and Head of Contemporary Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Ritter’s Focus section explores notions of the digital body/corpse/corpus, highlighting artists that broadly address questions such as how the digital can re-imagine the human body, or a body of work, and how technology can reanimate the past, or a past body of work.
In this presentation, Pouyan extends his enquiry into the genealogy of power in relation to ownership and the elimination of the human body. He traces the layers of political power in Iran to its roots in ancient civilization, from old Persian myths through to the medieval period, and asks if the political tactic of punishing the body and soul of the thinker could also eliminate his intellectual property.
Incarnation of the Body Politic, an enormous wood sculpture–painted in deepest pigment of black paint available today–over 4m long by 2m high, combines aspects of the guillotine and the trebuchet. Envisaged as a machine that filters and purifies the state by treating the body as the political property of the state and as the place where the vengeance of the sovereign can be applied–the anchoring point of the manifestation of power. One component of this sculpture, the trebuchet, was a product of the Middle East–developed by Persian prisoners of the Mongols and used in their campaigns in Europe. The first recorded instance of biological warfare was at the siege of Kaffa in October 1347, when the Khanate of the Golden Horde employed such machines to hurl the plague victims into the city, using enslaved Persian engineers to operate it. Its other component, the guillotine, represents the more recent import of Western industrialization. Simplified, refined, and devoid of details such as ropes and metal parts, this sculpture is stripped of its obvious primary function. The addition of a plinth and pedestal suggests a secondary purpose for the apparatus: having inflicted punishment, it then uplifts its sacrificial victim to a status worthy of awe and emulation. Revolutionary thought and thinkers, thus disposed of, can then be reincorporated back into the body politic, as “martyrs” or “visionaries”.
Incarnation of the Body Politic shows the repetition of history and human errors in different periods, a structure of impressive proportions but without a practical purpose–a failed construct. Pouyan states, “This sculpture is a piece of machinery from the East that was lost in history. We do not know that much about its usage, who used it and against whom.”