ORLAN

ORLAN: A Hybrid Body of Artworks is an in-depth academic account of ORLAN's pioneering art in its entirety. The book covers her career in performance and a range of other art forms. This single accessible overview of ORLAN's practices describes and analyses her various innovative uses of the body as artistic material. Edited by Simon Donger with Simon Shepherd and ORLAN herself, the collection highlights her artistic impact from the perspectives of both performance and visual cultures. The book features: vintage texts by ORLAN and on ORLAN's work, including manifestos, key writings and critical studies ten new contributions, responses and interviews by leading international specialists on performance and visual arts over fifty images demonstrating ORLAN's art, with thirty full colour pictures a new essay by ORLAN, written specially for this volume a new bibliography of writing on ORLAN an indexed listing of ORLAN’s artworks and key themes.

‘Rather than a single, overarching account of ORLAN’s oeuvre, what this book valuably provides is a range of texts exploring overlapping ideas, myriad mouthpieces returning to and unpacking certain qualities of ORLAN’s practice in distinctly different ways, suturing and dissecting these into fascinatingly autonomous analyses. For me, quite purposefully, the undisciplined collection of texts in this rigorous and exciting volume morphs in a multitude of ways, much like the artist’s own marvellously monstrous practice.’ – Rachel Zerihan, Contemporary Theatre Review

Simon Donger is a lecturer and a researcher in scenography and performance arts at Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. Simon Shepherd is Deputy Principal (Academic) and Professor of Theatre at Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. He is the author of Theatre, Body and Pleasure (Routledge 2006), and The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Theatre (Cambridge University Press 2009).ORLAN is a multidisciplinary artist, living and working in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. She is a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Cergy, France. She was formerly scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.