Body Art

In today's day and age, body art would be considered a part of performance art-very avant-garde.

However, body painting goes back to all of the major forms of body art known today. It appears in the ancient world although there is no evidence indicating a single place of origin for particular techniques.

Ancient cultures used body art to express identification with certain people and distinction from others. Through body art, members of a group could define the ideal person and highlight differences between individuals and groups. In the past, as today, body art may have been a way of communicating ideas about the afterlife and about the place of the individual in the universe.

Sometimes people decorate themselves to be more beautiful in the eyes of others, sometimes to scare enemies, and sometimes to tell a story.

In the whole history of mankind, people have decorated themselves - one way or another. With clothings, jewellery, tattoos, piercings, scars, permanent changes of the bone structure, plastic surgery - and by painting the body. If the decoration is performed with cowdung, coal or mascara from Max Factor, is more a cultural difference.

Body Art explores the many different ways, both temporary and permanent, in which people modify, change, decorate and adorn their bodies. It covers the what, why, how and where of body art.

Who does it, how do they do it and why do they do it? Themes covered include: universality, diversity and antiquity of styles; concepts of beauty; identity and transformation; meaning and significance of symbols; and pain, endurance and rites of passage.

Earrings, nose-rings, prince alberts, dydos, palangs, bangles, bracelets, rings, tattoos, makeup, body and face-paint, studs, nose-pins, nostrums, blood, hair, ochre, gold, silver, lip-plates, ear-weights, branding, scarring, tucking, sucking, squeezing, shaping: across all sections of society and across cultures people decorate and transform their bodies.