Christoph Zellweger (Sheffield Hallam University, UK/Switzerland) started as a trained craftsman and maker of fine jewellery and metalwork for the high-end market in Germany and Switzerland. After going through a rigorous phase of questioning his role as an artist-maker he developed a ‘critical edge’, which was manifested in his degree work at the Royal College of Art, London, where he qualified with distinction. In addition to exhibiting internationally and running his studio, he holds a professorial research post at Sheffield Hallam University, is a visiting professor at the University of Ulster, lectures on the MA in Product Design at Lucerne School of Art and Design and is a frequent speaker to interdisciplinary audiences in Europe’s leading design and art colleges and in America. In 2007 he published Foreign Bodies, a monography, which aims to extend the definition of body adornment today.
Keynote presentation
Incredibles: An artistic perspective on corporal design
In the collective search for self-realisation and improvement, societies around the globe engage in experimenting with medical technologies and procedures, supported by expanding industries. With the help of scientists, surgeons, psychologists and personal advisors the human body has become the subject of design, a luxury item and a commodity to be optimised and aestheticised.
This paper reports on an ongoing artistic enquiry into the constructed world of objects, bodies and identities. It critically reflects on body modification through plastic surgery and other forms of body customisation. The paper poses questions around how these developments may affect people’s perceptions of identity and in which way the experience of the sensible world may be altered or extended. The paper describes tangible, body-related objects responding to factual, fictional and ethical dimensions of the subject. The works of three recent exhibitions are presented, where artistic strategies with an affinity to Critical Design have been combined with surgical techniques in order to create discursive objects.
The investigation suggests a possible “Corporal Design”-practice and sees the emerging field as the ultimate ‘embodiment’ of material culture. Through the making of critical, artistic objects and fictional products it assesses relevant cultural, social and political metamorphosis happening skin deep.