Body and Lens: Who Owns the Body?

This online exhibition considers looking, being looked at and thinking about being looked at.

When you look at yourself who do you see? Does a true, whole, unbiased representation of oneself exist? Or are we all knowingly trapped in a world of looking at ourselves and each other?

Who are you when you are not in front of a lens? Who were these individuals outside of the paintings they have been trapped in?

Sourced from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection and curated by a group of MA students from the University of Leeds, Body and Lens asks questions about the self and the other through canvas paintings across the 19th and 20th centuries.

Like snapshots from an unrelated third person, we are shown who the artist wants us to see.

We invite you to explore ideas of the gaze and what it truly means to be seen.

Curated by Konomi Kabashima, Jiahui Yu, Jiaqi Wang and Manaal Hameed.

Visit the exhibition

Body and Lens: Who Owns the Body? is one of eight online exhibitions curated by MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies and MA Arts Management and Heritage students from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, as part of an Interpretations course module.

A link to the exhibition will be made available here from 11 December.

Image

Laura Wheeler Waring, Girl in Pink Dress (detail), ca. 1927. Oil on canvas. Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace, Florence and Herbert Irving, Ford Foundation and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest Gifts, 2024. Image used under The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access Initiative.