Maria Bodil, Body

When I first saw Maria Bodil's new work 'Body', I found myself reaching for two very different reference points. One pointed backward, to the Italian Futurists of the early twentieth century, to Balla and Severini painting the human form at the exact moment industrialisation was rewriting what it meant to move through the world. The other pointed sideways, to Donna Haraway, to Björk, to Sevdaliza, artists and thinkers who have spent decades asking what happens to the female body when it enters into dialogue with technology on its own terms.

Both feel true to what Maria Bodil have made here, and true in different ways. The first is about the eye, what this work looks like, and why that visual language keeps returning at moments of technological rupture. The second is about the body, who it belongs to, what it means to feed yourself into a machine and take back something transformed. Together, I hope they offer two ways into a body of work that rewards more than one reading.

Body, Machine, Motion

There is something uncanny about looking at Giacomo Balla's fragmented forms or Gino Severini's dissolving dancers and then turning to the work of Maria Bodil. The resemblance is immediate, bodies caught between states, planes of light and shadow that refuse to settle into a single silhouette, figures that seem to occupy multiple moments at once.

The Futurists were painting at the exact hinge point between the human and the industrial. The car, the train, the factory, these were not just subjects but provocations. Balla wanted to show what it felt like to move through a world suddenly accelerating beyond the speed of perception. Severini found the same energy in the dancer: a body so alive it could no longer be contained in a single frozen image.

Maria Bodil arrived at a strikingly similar visual territory through an entirely different door. Their process, using photographs of their own bodies to train an AI model, then moving the resulting images back through analog printing and into the machine again, produced something the Futurists could not have imagined but might have recognized immediately. The body fragmented, reconstructed, caught in an ongoing loop between the human and the technological.

It was not their intention to quote Futurism. But perhaps that is what makes the connection more interesting. Both moments in time share the same underlying tension: what happens to the human form, to intimacy, to identity, to the body as something we recognize and claim, when it enters into dialogue with a new and disorienting technology? Balla and Severini asked that question at the dawn of the industrial age. Maria Bodil asks it now.

The century between them turns out to be shorter than it looks.

The Body Belongs to Her

Donna Haraway opened her Cyborg Manifesto in 1985 with a provocation: the boundary between human and machine was already gone, and the only question was what we were going to do with that fact. The cyborg she described was not a threat, it was a possibility. A figure without fixed origin, without a natural state to return to, without a body that needed to be protected from technology. For Haraway, the dissolution of that boundary was specifically liberating for women, whose bodies had always been defined, contained, and spoken for by others.

Forty years later, the provocation has become a practice. Björk has spent three decades making music and images in which the female body is simultaneously organic and synthetic, grieving and algorithmic, vulnerable and technically transformed. Sevdaliza builds her entire visual world around the same tension, her videos present a female form that is post-natural, caught beautifully between states. Neither artist presents technology as something that happens to the body. In their hands, the body uses technology to become more fully itself.

What strikes me, looking at the work from the outside, is that the process Maria Bodil have chosen, photographing their own bodies, feeding those images into a machine, taking back the output and moving it through analog processes again, opens itself to exactly this reading. Two women who put themselves into the machine and took something back. What came back is fragmented, luminous, and stubbornly alive. That, it seems to me, is the point.