"Opera Medica" (2025), Agnes Questionmark, Directed by Giulia Mucci, still photography by Jason Baker, Three-channel video installation. Courtesy the artist
In 1990, the late pioneering queer filmmaker Barbara Hammer released Sanctus, a short experimental film culled together from archival moving X-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson, which she then rephotographed and reimagined, playing with the speed and adding splashes of color and other visual effects. Hammer, whose iconic 1986 piece Snow Job exposed the flurry of media misinformation at the height of the AIDS epidemic, would spend much of her 50-year career examining various aspects of the American medical system.
It’s Hammer’s work that first planted the seed for “Overexposed,” an impactful new exhibit at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image in Queens that explores the intersection of technology and the body. What first drew curator Sonia Shechet Epstein to Sanctus was the quotidian nature of the X-rays Hammer was repurposing. “I was struck by how these weren’t images of sick people but of people doing everyday activities like putting on lipstick or drinking water,” says Shechet. “The film is critical of the fact that these are bodies being exposed to harmful levels of radiation, but it’s also bathing you in beauty, and that dichotomy struck me.” And it sent her down a rabbit hole researching not just the history of X-rays, and how they have been embraced by various artists to reveal the body in a new way, but also medical imaging writ large. Looking at everything from X-rays and MRIs to CT scans and ultrasounds, Shechet discovered how the technology the medical establishment has used to peer inside our bodies has been formative in how we collectively view and understand them.
The show volleys between artwork that uses or responds to various medical technologies and actual archival and scientific footage. (Note: Even for those fluent in mainstream medical dramas like The Pitt, some of the content may prove to be all too real.) The overlap between art and science seems predestined; in December of 1895, cinema made its debut with a public screening of the Lumière brothers on the same day that German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen published his discovery of X-ray radiation. Both are documented at the beginning of the exhibit. You’ll find Walt Disney’s eerily cheerful The Skeleton Dance from 1929; images from a 1956 edition of Life magazine chronicling a beauty pageant where female contestants’ X-rayed insides determined their fate; The Beginning of Life, Lennart Nilsson’s famous 1965 video of fetuses that would be appropriated by the anti-abortion movement; X-ray records, known colloquially as bone music, of Beatles albums created by bootleggers in the USSR; and Ana Mendieta’s 16mm 1975 film X-Ray of her own skull being imaged (her only film ever with sound). There is Leslie Thornton’s 1993 video Strange Space, which juxtaposes photos of internal organs with ones of the surface of the moon, nodding to inner and outer space; Liz Magic Laser’s cheeky single-channel video Mine, where she directs a Da Vinci Surgical System robot to perform an endoscopy on her purse, pulling out mascara and dollar bills; Donald Rodney’s ingenious Autoicon, a platform completed two years after his death from sickle cell anemia, where viewers engage in a text-based chat with the late artist; and Opera Medica, a dramatic three-channel video installation by Agnes Questionmark where the artist, who has undergone gender-affirming surgery, now performs it on a part-human, part-sea creature as a powerful sublimation of their own trauma.
The show volleys between artwork that uses or responds to various medical technologies and actual archival and scientific footage. (Note: Even for those fluent in mainstream medical dramas like The Pitt, some of the content may prove to be all too real.) The overlap between art and science seems predestined; in December of 1895, cinema made its debut with a public screening of the Lumière brothers on the same day that German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen published his discovery of X-ray radiation. Both are documented at the beginning of the exhibit. You’ll find Walt Disney’s eerily cheerful The Skeleton Dance from 1929; images from a 1956 edition of Life magazine chronicling a beauty pageant where female contestants’ X-rayed insides determined their fate; The Beginning of Life, Lennart Nilsson’s famous 1965 video of fetuses that would be appropriated by the anti-abortion movement; X-ray records, known colloquially as bone music, of Beatles albums created by bootleggers in the USSR; and Ana Mendieta’s 16mm 1975 film X-Ray of her own skull being imaged (her only film ever with sound). There is Leslie Thornton’s 1993 video Strange Space, which juxtaposes photos of internal organs with ones of the surface of the moon, nodding to inner and outer space; Liz Magic Laser’s cheeky single-channel video Mine, where she directs a Da Vinci Surgical System robot to perform an endoscopy on her purse, pulling out mascara and dollar bills; Donald Rodney’s ingenious Autoicon, a platform completed two years after his death from sickle cell anemia, where viewers engage in a text-based chat with the late artist; and Opera Medica, a dramatic three-channel video installation by Agnes Questionmark where the artist, who has undergone gender-affirming surgery, now performs it on a part-human, part-sea creature as a powerful sublimation of their own trauma.
