Towards Immortal Perfection

This half-rotten portrait is a religious relic of our age, where existential meaning and immortality are believed to be reached through repetition of images and perfecting appearance.

Skin is not only a personal, sensory and sensual thing. It is also connected to society, economics and politics. Contemporary market-based society is focused on productising sensory and experiential modes of being.

Your skin is a surplus value factor for economy. Many sectories of market are related to productisation of visual appearance, or more generally, to aestheticization of lifestyle. Different fields from advertising to media, from fashion to beauty industry, from entertainment to social media, participate in capitalizing obsession for aesthetic perfection.

In contemporary society, driven by the celebrity cult in media, and the compulsion to selfie in social media, the value of human being is counted from the repetition of images. In the visual age, especially women’s role is to become fetish-objects of market. The humankind has obtained, through neoliberal economy, a religious dream: immortality can be gained, through obedient consumers, immediately.

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The work is a manually and digitally altered magazine advertisement. The original advertisement spoke about ”the future of more perfect skin”.