Corporeal Politics: Power, Desire, and the Sacred – Andres Serrano

These photographs, each taken from three different series (The Klan, The Morgue, and The Church), encapsulate Serrano’s distinctive aesthetic characterised by the interplay of latent violence, mortality, dignity, and spirituality.

The white fabrics weave a visual link between these strikingly beautiful images, creating an atmosphere that feels almost serene in spite of the deeply unsettling subject matter. The power they exert – at once ambiguous and compelling – is orchestrated through a deliberately formal distance that the photographs seem to emanate.

Although Serrano’s approach draws on real situations, the photograph that constitutes the artwork is itself purely staged. Set against the black background, vivid details emerge from the surface of the photographs – the eye of the Klan member (an American white supremacist group), the shrouded face of the child in the morgue (Child Abuse I), and Sister Jeanne’s hands – suspended moments poised between dread and serenity, life and death, absence and presence, interiority and exteriority.