Mounir Fatmi
BEMIS CENTER
UB ART GALLERIES
In Mounir Fatmi’s photographic series The Blinding Light, images of contemporary operating rooms are layered onto reproductions of a predella panel from the San Marco altarpiece (1440) depicting what is held up as the earliest Western artistic depiction of a medical transplant. Opaquely titled The Healing of Justinian, Fra Angelico’s panel gives visual form to the story of Saints Cosmas and Damian’s miracle: their posthumous saving of a white male patient by transplanting the leg of a recently-deceased black man, snatched from a nearby cemetery. This story—now more accurately called the “Miracle of the Black Leg”—contributed to the construction of the Black body as a storehouse of disposable parts ripe for extraction. Assigning the miracle to the long-dead saints, the depicted story simultaneously grants/denies the Black donor’s supernatural powers, robbing him of any agency. Miracle of the Black Leg depictions propagated across Northern Italy and on to Inquisitionist, slave-trading Spain, from where they spread to the Americas. Even today, Saints Cosmas and Damian are often credited, in contemporary medical literature, with the invention of transplantation.
Fatmi’s reliance on repetition and the series’ insistent layering of the Renaissance image onto one contemporary operating room after another remind us that the structural racialized violence that accompanied the birth of Western medicine is alive and well today.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Tangiers, Morocco, Mounir Fatmi lives between Paris and Sóller, Spain. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented by numerous institutions, including Göteborgs Konsthall, Sweden (2018); MAMCO, Geneva (2015), Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf (2013); AKBank Foundation, Istanbul (2011); Musée Picasso – La Guerre et la Paix, Vallauris, France (2007) and Migros Museum, Zurich (2003). He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC (2021, 2018); Brooklyn Museum of Art (2021, 2015, 2011); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020, 2014); Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2018, 2011); Louvre Abu Dhabi (2017); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2015); Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2013); MAXXI, Rome (2013); Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2010); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2008, 2005); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2006); and Hayward Gallery, London (2005). Fatmi’s work has also been included in biennials in Auckland, Bamako, Dakar, Göteborg, Gwangju, Lyon, Sevilla, Sharjah, Shenzhen, Venice as well as in Japan’s Setouchi Triennale and Echigo-Tsumari Triennial.
PRESS
Gregory Volk, “What is Hospitality in an Era of Crisis?” Hyperallergic, February 16, 2023.
Alberto Rey, “Investigating Global Issued Related to the Body: UB galleries host international exhibition,“ Buffalo Spree, December 14, 2022.
Jonathan Orozco, “I don’t know you like that,” The Reader, February 25, 2022.
Mounir Fatmi
BEMIS CENTER
UB ART GALLERIES
In Mounir Fatmi’s photographic series The Blinding Light, images of contemporary operating rooms are layered onto reproductions of a predella panel from the San Marco altarpiece (1440) depicting what is held up as the earliest Western artistic depiction of a medical transplant. Opaquely titled The Healing of Justinian, Fra Angelico’s panel gives visual form to the story of Saints Cosmas and Damian’s miracle: their posthumous saving of a white male patient by transplanting the leg of a recently-deceased black man, snatched from a nearby cemetery. This story—now more accurately called the “Miracle of the Black Leg”—contributed to the construction of the Black body as a storehouse of disposable parts ripe for extraction. Assigning the miracle to the long-dead saints, the depicted story simultaneously grants/denies the Black donor’s supernatural powers, robbing him of any agency. Miracle of the Black Leg depictions propagated across Northern Italy and on to Inquisitionist, slave-trading Spain, from where they spread to the Americas. Even today, Saints Cosmas and Damian are often credited, in contemporary medical literature, with the invention of transplantation.
Fatmi’s reliance on repetition and the series’ insistent layering of the Renaissance image onto one contemporary operating room after another remind us that the structural racialized violence that accompanied the birth of Western medicine is alive and well today.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Tangiers, Morocco, Mounir Fatmi lives between Paris and Sóller, Spain. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented by numerous institutions, including Göteborgs Konsthall, Sweden (2018); MAMCO, Geneva (2015), Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf (2013); AKBank Foundation, Istanbul (2011); Musée Picasso – La Guerre et la Paix, Vallauris, France (2007) and Migros Museum, Zurich (2003). He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC (2021, 2018); Brooklyn Museum of Art (2021, 2015, 2011); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020, 2014); Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2018, 2011); Louvre Abu Dhabi (2017); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2015); Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2013); MAXXI, Rome (2013); Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2010); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2008, 2005); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2006); and Hayward Gallery, London (2005). Fatmi’s work has also been included in biennials in Auckland, Bamako, Dakar, Göteborg, Gwangju, Lyon, Sevilla, Sharjah, Shenzhen, Venice as well as in Japan’s Setouchi Triennale and Echigo-Tsumari Triennial.
PRESS
Gregory Volk, “What is Hospitality in an Era of Crisis?” Hyperallergic, February 16, 2023.
Alberto Rey, “Investigating Global Issued Related to the Body: UB galleries host international exhibition,“ Buffalo Spree, December 14, 2022.
Jonathan Orozco, “I don’t know you like that,” The Reader, February 25, 2022.