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The artist creates self-hybridizations in homage to women in history whom she admires because they defended causes that ORLAN supports in her life and work. Che pioneering women who paved the way for other women took risks that sometimes cost them their lives. Soten forgotten, erased or under-represented, ORLAN brings them back into the limelight with this series. The artist, as usual, breaks down the ice walls between artistic practices, genres, eras and skin tones. Chis gesture of hybridization with the other allows her to give them an artist’s kiss and create a meeting between women despite the mists of time that separate them. En reference to the great historical portraits, ORLAN prints these artists’ digital photomontages on canvas stretched and framed.

(Work in progess, other femmages are in production)

An orphaned Spanish artist born to a prostitute and heroin addict mother who abandoned him at birth, he questions this lack and absence in his work. Abel Azcona creates a new protocol in which he invites the great women of the art world who have inspired him for a series of duo photos. They don’t replace her mother, but represent a guide, a strong, emancipating feminine reference point. At the same time, it’s a tribute to the mothers of performance. Two generations meet, the historic artists and the new generation. Abel Azcona began this series in Amsterdam with Marina Abramovic, and is now continuing it in Paris with ORLAN.

On this occasion, ORLAN creates “L’éléphant de la forêt d’Afrique en voie de disparition et nouveaux robots en objets et matériaux recyclés”. This work is a continuation of the artist’s questioning of endangered animals, with the particularity that the elephant is hybridized with the skin of a leopard and lizard.

“Leather goods take us back to what we call “the beautiful hand”, but also to bags made of leather or animal skins (lizard, crocodile…). Today, we’re looking at all the materials we use, both natural and man-made, and their carbon footprint. My work questions the disappearance of certain animals and birds. I present these animals, which I hybridize with other animals in their natural environment, surrounded by robots. The robots are made from recycled objects. They are there to question the new technologies that can either destroy or build a more responsible world. “ORLAN

In these photos, ORLAN has recreated the materials and textures used by the unknown artists who inspired her creative process. They are mutant bodies emerging from the earth, from stone, from jade, many of them green, others red, symbolizing the importance of blood and sun for the Mayans. The yellow of the corn, the brown of the earth, the grey of the stone appear. There’s a meeting of two materialities: the concrete materials and digital pixels that ORLAN uses and injects into her works. The hybridization that most emancipates itself from Maya iconography is the one in jade stone: a mask of an anthropomorphic figure that sticks out its tongue, and is the big star of the museum. ORLAN inserted her eyes, her tongue and her blue wig.
The predominantly male Mayan statuary has been feminized by ORLAN’s face, and each portrait has a different age.

ORLAN decided to see what was going on by doing the same thing to the other side of humanity, reproducing the work, including its dimensions and frame, in photographic form. She then presented Jean-Christophe Bouvet, an actor who played in “Sous le soleil de Satan” with Gérard Depardieu, with his cock,  medium-sized and erect. ORLAN describes it as “the devil’s tail”. 

This feminist response questions the role of men and women in our society and how they are represented.

In 2022, in view of current events, ORLAN created a second version of “L’Origine de la guerre“, thirty years after the first, with a new model.

These recycled-object robots with ORLAN’s face can be seen in two ways: as destroyers and symbols of a dreaded future, or as protectors, standing by the animal’s side, accompanying the last survivors of their species towards a rethought future. Robots and new technologies question the link between the animal and human kingdoms. As much as these species left to their inexorable demise, the robots thus constructed are rebuses of modernity, made up of obsolete, abandoned and depreciated objects that ORLAN recycles to revalue them and create with humor.

Part of the series is materialized in the form of luminous tapestries printed on fiber optics, powered by an LED track system. They have been produced using technology developed by brochier® technologies.

ORLAN creates very abrupt digital collages in which she inserts fragments of her face: her eyes bulging out, her eyes askew, her ear upside down and her mouth screaming, showing her teeth ready to bite so that anger expresses itself in the work. This is a snapshot of that awareness. ORLAN is not putting Pablo Picasso or Dora Maar on trial, as they can no longer defend themselves, but rather expressing herself to the women of today who remain in the shadows: the inspirers, the models, the muses who played a major role in the fame of our great masters. It’s an incentive to emancipation. ORLAN tells them “stop being objects, become subjects. Emancipate yourselves, stop suffering, stop crying”.

ORLAN had his body scanned and then articulated so that he could perform all the acrobatics of the Peking Opera. With an artificial body, all distortions are conceivable; with a biological body, they are impossible. 

ORLAN has dressed her avatars and added tattoos that repeat the same motifs of hybridized photography. Each work of art has a different avatar, which comes out of the frame if you download the ARTI VIVE application and scan the work of art with it. 

You can then take photos of yourself, your friends and your avatar, and send them around the world just like any other selfie.

In his travel diaries, he paints the natives with respect, at a time when everyone considered them dirty, uncultured savages. He painted them in all their magnificence, in their ceremonial clothes, with their jewels and their superb feathers. ORLAN based her Self-hybridations amérindiennes series on these paintings and drawings. Of course, she transgressed their laws, as it was impossible for a woman to be a leader. ORLAN represents herself with jewelry forbidden to women, in particular that made from bear claws.

This series consists of a series of black and white photographs based on ethnographic photography, the first photos in which the Other is photographed. ORLAN also creates a few color works, as well as resin sculptures of mutant characters, notably exhibited at the 1999 Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art: “Partage d’exotismes”, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin.

In her series, ORLAN creates a manifesto work “Femme Surmas avec Labret et Visage de Femme Euro-Stéphanoise avec bigoudis” (Surmas Woman with Labret and Euro-Stephanoise Woman’s Face with Curlers), which demonstrates that beauty is merely a question of dominant ideology in a historical and geographical location. 

ORLAN presents a woman with a huge labret, very confident and sure of her ability to seduce, because in her tribe, the bigger the labret, the more desirable the woman. If we wore a labret here and now, in our Western culture, we would be designated by all as unbeatable monsters!

His trip to India was part of “le plan du film”, a series of works imagined from the reading of a quote by Jean-Luc Godard: “The only greatness of Jacques Becker’s Montparnasse 19 is that it is not only an upside-down film, but in a way the upside-down of cinema.” The concept was to take Godard literally, to create an upside-down film, starting with the poster and promotion with the trailer, letrilles, a soundtrack and a TV show to launch the feature. ORLAN enlisted the help of Publidécor, an advertising agency specializing in 1950s painted movie posters, to create fourteen painted posters based on photos of the artist and recycled works. Her intention with these hand-painted acrylic posters on 3 m x 2 m canvases was to tell the story of her life in art. ORLAN made the posters using the names of her friends in the art world at the time, and one or two names of movie stars to make it seem as if the film existed. She also staged a fake press conference with director Bigas Luna and curator Lorand Hegyi for a Valencia biennial. She invited a number of journalists to talk about a film she had made that didn’t really exist.

On others she poses with one or more multicolored ballets in dynamic gestures, and in the last she stages herself with post-operative bandages and false blues.

The installation of the work, inspired by Thomas McEvilley’s Art and Discontent-Theory at the Millenium, features a motion detector that triggers a recording of ORLAN repeating the phrase “Would you care for some content, Mr. Greenberg?”.

For her first series, the artist hybridizes with pre-Columbian cultures, with over thirty works, some inspired by the skull deformations found among pre-Columbians, Africans, Egyptians and Merovingians! The Vierge à l’Enfant (Virgin and Child) from Rabastens attests to this, showing both the Virgin and Child with a deformed, elongated skull. 

In her work, ORLAN has sought to break away from Western references and stereotypes of beauty, creating this first series using digital photography and interactive 3D video installations based on skull deformities, squinting, nose jobs known to the Mayas, Olmecs and Aztecs, and representations of the god Xipe Totec.

The “Exogène” exhibition, created by Bruno Guiganti and Morten Salling, took the form of a multi-part criminal investigation and identity quest. Works created by ORLAN using her own blood and flesh have been submitted to  the Danish forensic police for sequencing to verify whether they were created by the same artist. Sequencing analysis proved that they had indeed been produced by ORLAN. These works were a reliquary with flesh in the center and a St suaires soaked in ORLAN’s blood.

This fiction within a fiction spread throughout Copenhagen. Wanted posters featuring ORLAN were then put up all over the city, and a skull supposedly found by the art center was handed over to the criminal investigation department to find out if it might belong to her.

Traces of this investigation (works by ORLAN, fingerprints, DNA sequencing, wanted notices, skulls, etc.) were then exhibited in the desecrated Nikolaj Church, transformed into an art center.

LA RÉINCARNATION DE SAINTE-ORLAN OU IMAGES NOUVELLES-IMAGES DITES OPÉRATIONS-CHIRURGICALES-PERFORMANCES, is a series of 9 performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels and New York. ORLAN created this series to derail surgery from its habits of enhancement and rejuvenation, and to perform surgical operations that weren’t supposed to bring beauty, but ugliness, monstrosity and indesirability. 

The central idea behind these surgical operations was to combat stereotypes and models. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery, but against what we do with it. She uses this technique to invent the self-love by attacking the mask of the innate. The first condition with the different surgeons was no pain, because ORLAN is all for BODY-PLEASURE. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating theatre, turning it into her artist’s studio. She and the rest of the medical staff were costumed by a renowned designer working in collaboration with the artist. The performances were orchestrated by readings, and when the surgical gesture allowed it, ORLAN produced images, films, videos, photos, drawings with her blood and fingers, reliquaries with her fat and flesh, “holy-suaries” of sorts made with her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation onto which she made photographic transfers, and objects subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.

LA RÉINCARNATION DE SAINTE-ORLAN OU IMAGES NOUVELLES-IMAGES DITES OPÉRATIONS-CHIRURGICALES-PERFORMANCES, is a series of 9 performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels and New York. ORLAN created this series to derail surgery from its habits of enhancement and rejuvenation, and to perform surgical operations that weren’t supposed to bring beauty, but ugliness, monstrosity and indesirability. 

The central idea behind these surgical operations was to combat stereotypes and models. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery, but against what we do with it. She uses this technique to invent the self-love by attacking the mask of the innate. The first condition with the different surgeons was no pain, because ORLAN is all for BODY-PLEASURE. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating theatre, turning it into her artist’s studio. She and the rest of the medical staff were costumed by a renowned designer working in collaboration with the artist. The performances were orchestrated by readings, and when the surgical gesture allowed it, ORLAN produced images, films, videos, photos, drawings with her blood and fingers, reliquaries with her fat and flesh, “holy-suaries” of sorts made with her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation onto which she made photographic transfers, and objects subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.

ORLAN has captured the “in-between”, i.e. the exact image of the environment conceived from her face hybridized with a portrait of one of her art-historical reference figures, without retouching.

At the top, on the other side of the diptych, ORLAN used magnets to place the image of the day, a self-portrait made by the MACHINE-CORPS, of a face first with bandages, then with colors: from blue to yellow to red, the whole quite swollen. A metal plate was installed between these two images, engraved with the words: entre-deux and the day’s date.

By the last day, the installation was complete and so was the exhibition.

LA RÉINCARNATION DE SAINTE-ORLAN OU IMAGES NOUVELLES-IMAGES DITES OPÉRATIONS-CHIRURGICALES-PERFORMANCES, is a series of 9 performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels and New York. ORLAN created this series to derail surgery from its habits of enhancement and rejuvenation, and to perform surgical operations that weren’t supposed to bring beauty, but ugliness, monstrosity and indesirability. 

The central idea behind these surgical operations was to combat stereotypes and models. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery, but against what we do with it. She uses this technique to invent the self-love by attacking the mask of the innate. The first condition with the different surgeons was no pain, because ORLAN is all for BODY-PLEASURE. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating theatre, turning it into her artist’s studio. She and the rest of the medical staff were costumed by a renowned designer working in collaboration with the artist. The performances were orchestrated by readings, and when the surgical gesture allowed it, ORLAN produced images, films, videos, photos, drawings with her blood and fingers, reliquaries with her fat and flesh, “holy-suaries” of sorts made with her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation onto which she made photographic transfers, and objects subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.

Among the medical team and the STUDIO ORLAN team, there was a woman specializing in sign language for the deaf and hard of hearing, and this character was there to remind us that we are all deaf and hard of hearing at certain times. His presence in the operating theatre was a display of body language. She was assisted by Raphaël Cuir, videographer Tom Klinkowstein, who handled the satellite transmission, Sophie Thompson, who took care of the English translation, and Connie Chung, the famous star broadcaster of the time, who asked to be in the operating room with ORLAN and did a full report on the CNN evening news at 8pm. She came to France to attend ORLAN’s wedding to Raphaël Cuir in Sologne. 

During this mythical operation, ORLAN had solid silicone implants placed on her cheekbones to enhance them on both sides of her forehead. The idea was to create an operation that wouldn’t bring beauty but, on the contrary, undesirability and monstrosity. ORLAN wanted to demonstrate that beauty is a dictate of the dominant ideology in a geographical and historical point in time. These bumps have become organs of seduction. ORLAN says “it’s my convertible”. 

Thanks to Christian Vanderborght, this performance was broadcast live via satellite to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Mac Luhan Centre in Toronto, the Banff Multimedia Centre, Canada, Belgium, Germany, Latvia, Japan, the Netherlands, New York, Santa Monica and in France to Nice and Lyon. Spectators from all over the world were able to watch the operation and ask questions, which ORLAN answered live as soon as the surgical procedure allowed. Participants in the satellite transmission at the Centre Georges Pompidou included Gladys Fabre, Jean-Paul Fargier, Christian Vanderborght and François Barré, President of the Centre, among others.

LA RÉINCARNATION DE SAINTE-ORLAN OU IMAGES NOUVELLES-IMAGES DITES OPÉRATIONS-CHIRURGICALES-PERFORMANCES, is a series of 9 performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels and New York. ORLAN created this series to derail surgery from its habits of enhancement and rejuvenation, and to perform surgical operations that weren’t supposed to bring beauty, but ugliness, monstrosity and indesirability. 

The central idea behind these surgical operations was to combat stereotypes and models. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery, but against what we do with it. She uses this technique to invent the self-love by attacking the mask of the innate. The first condition with the different surgeons was no pain, because ORLAN is all for BODY-PLEASURE. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating theatre, turning it into her artist’s studio. She and the rest of the medical staff were costumed by a renowned designer working in collaboration with the artist. The performances were orchestrated by readings, and when the surgical gesture allowed it, ORLAN produced images, films, videos, photos, drawings with her blood and fingers, reliquaries with her fat and flesh, “holy-suaries” of sorts made with her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation onto which she made photographic transfers, and objects subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.

LA RÉINCARNATION DE SAINTE-ORLAN OU IMAGES NOUVELLES-IMAGES DITES OPÉRATIONS-CHIRURGICALES-PERFORMANCES, is a series of 9 performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels and New York. ORLAN created this series to derail surgery from its habits of enhancement and rejuvenation, and to perform surgical operations that weren’t supposed to bring beauty, but ugliness, monstrosity and indesirability. 

The central idea behind these surgical operations was to combat stereotypes and models. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery, but against what we do with it. She uses this technique to invent the self-love by attacking the mask of the innate. The first condition with the different surgeons was no pain, because ORLAN is all for BODY-PLEASURE. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating theatre, turning it into her artist’s studio. She and the rest of the medical staff were costumed by a renowned designer working in collaboration with the artist. The performances were orchestrated by readings, and when the surgical gesture allowed it, ORLAN produced images, films, videos, photos, drawings with her blood and fingers, reliquaries with her fat and flesh, “holy-suaries” of sorts made with her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation onto which she made photographic transfers, and objects subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.

LA RÉINCARNATION DE SAINTE-ORLAN OU IMAGES NOUVELLES-IMAGES DITES OPÉRATIONS-CHIRURGICALES-PERFORMANCES, is a series of 9 performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels and New York. ORLAN created this series to derail surgery from its habits of enhancement and rejuvenation, and to perform surgical operations that weren’t supposed to bring beauty, but ugliness, monstrosity and indesirability. 

The central idea behind these surgical operations was to combat stereotypes and models. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery, but against what we do with it. She uses this technique to invent the self-love by attacking the mask of the innate. The first condition with the different surgeons was no pain, because ORLAN is all for BODY-PLEASURE. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating theatre, turning it into her artist’s studio. She and the rest of the medical staff were costumed by a renowned designer working in collaboration with the artist. The performances were orchestrated by readings, and when the surgical gesture allowed it, ORLAN produced images, films, videos, photos, drawings with her blood and fingers, reliquaries with her fat and flesh, “holy-suaries” of sorts made with her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation onto which she made photographic transfers, and objects subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.