Sidsel Meineche Hansen: Grumpy
Grumpy is a declaration of unrequited love. The artwork combines melodic voice recordings, CGI animation, and ceroplastic – an eighteenth-century technique for casting anatomical wax models from dissected bodies. In the film, a chilling echo of the porn industry’s production of silicone bodies for automated use is conflated with the figure of the Anatomical Venus, who is cut open to eroticise the function of the reproductive and sexual organs.
Working with an anatomist to execute the dissection of a body donated to research and a medical artist to cast the sexual and reproductive organs of this medical specimen, Hansen combines a sculpted 3D character and an anatomical wax model, as the basis for the Grumpy artwork. The film reproduces the organs and reanimates the body, partly scanned and transformed into a high-fidelity digital render, prompting questions around love in connection to agency, consent and function.
The artwork is best experienced on mobile with the sound on.
“The work is invested in the idea of the current industrial complex relating to the porn, adult entertainment and pharmaceutical industry, and how they invest in the slow mutation of the human organism.”
Sidsel Meineche Hansen
Grumpy aims to challenge our understanding of digital intimacy. Its protagonist is a computer-generated Anatomical Venus, an Enlightenment-era wax figure used to teach medical students’ anatomy. The figure’s entire front body is cut-open and is seen singing to the viewer. The slick wax-like computer aesthetic transforms the artificial into living: a dehydrated puppet with a metallic vertebral column, suggesting industrial manufacture and clinical precision. The figure, immobile except for her moving mouth, lies dissected on the floor, revealing only her reproductive organs with a living foetus. The figure feels immediately strange and abject, with a disturbing identity yet unnervingly familiar.
About the Artist
Sidsel Meineche Hansen works in a variety of mediums and forms spanning wood, clay, metal, CGI animation, VR and video. Her practice explores how things are made and industrially produced, particularly relating to the gendering or functioning of objects.
