Karly’s research investigates the role of tattooing within contemporary avant-grade art practice, specifically the medium’s ability to speak to experiences of marginalization. Her forthcoming essay, “Tattooed Cartographies and the Displaced Body in an Age of Political Conflict”, explores the material, psychical, and historic connections between tattooed maps and narratives of forced displacement. As an extension of her work on tattoo materiality, she has also studied tattooed skin collections housed in medical museums around the world.
The Two-Body Medium: Tattooed Skins and Empathic Witnessing in Contemporary Art
Human skins are potent cultural signifiers. Existing at the border between self and other, these living surfaces project a person’s individual identity while simultaneously reflecting their socio-cultural milieu. As a medium rooted in skin, tattoos therefore perform a multitude of functions and contain similarly diverse and contingent meanings. Regardless of the individual nature of the tattoo in question (whether the design references a secret experience or is located in a visually inaccessible area of the body) tattoos rarely exist in isolation. In the majority of instances, the process of tattooing the body or viewing tattoo art is a two-body equation. Most tattooed peoples acquire their ink by commissioning a specialist to render chosen designs on their skin, necessitating a human-to-human connection to create the image in question. Additionally, in order to view the world’s tattoos in situ, another person must be present for the viewing to occur. This paper explores inter-human connection as an essential element of tattooing, one that has attracted an increasing number of contemporary artists to employ the medium in their work over the last few decades. By examining this avant garde trend, I’ll discuss the ways in which artists not only acknowledge the social relevance of these permanently-rendered designs, but also rely on the tattoo’s ability to manifest real-time moments of authentic and empathic witnessing in the hopes of catalyzing societal change.