The New Museum’s summer shows on Ed Atkins and Lynn Hershman Leeson investigate personhood in the face of technology, and the questions they ask of us are nothing short of profound. How does technology change the body? How is a body constructed, socially and biologically? What is personhood, and to what objects or beings is this dignity granted? Both artists route their investigations through their own bodies, but their stakes are otherwise quite distinct. Atkins is interested in theorising reality and illusion, locating the contours at which these concepts collapse, and exploring the losslessness of memory and image. Hershman Leeson probes not only the mechanics, but also the ethics of identity, rooted in a decades-long engagement with feminist discourses of performance, the cyborg and corporeality, as well as more recent conversations about environmental justice and biotechnology.
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