The augmented, ideal self is widely represented as the most diffused and desirable paradigm in contemporary societies.
A large part of the dreams, ambitions, and aspirations of the modern individual converge on achieving a positive mind within a perfect body—a compendium of fitness, aesthetic procedures, and artificial implants.
This ageless techno-creature, with its luscious appearance, conceals a monstrous, ungovernable fear of death.
The series Beautification incorporates the mystique of beauty, subverting its typical representation of the female body and criticizing the commodification of perfectionism and self-improvement that is characteristic of consumerist societies driven by social media trends.
Derived from photographic self-portraits of the artist engaged in various procedures while using different beauty gadgets and tools, the project employs Artificial Intelligence to reprocess the images, generating surreal visions of bodies entangled with sophisticated, exaggerated technological machinery and devices, mimicking and satirising the daily, obsessive disciplinary aesthetic practices demanded by society’s unrealistic standards of perfection.
In scenes set within claustrophobic domestic rooms or echoey empty spaces, avatars of the artist are categorized in a hallucinatory catalogue of the absurd, embodying modern collective obsessions with the ideal self, and the fixtation with slimness and youth, as symptoms of the regulation of the body, particularly women’s bodies, in contemporary culture.
*The names of the devices and titles of the images were created in collaboration with ChatGPT.