Marta Orlando

17. 9. 2025

Marta Orlando, Perfect bodies with bad tattoos, 2020–ongoing

Perfect bodies with bad tattoos, 2020–ongoing

In this series, the artist presents each canvas as a self-portrait of the breast viewed from a projected future. The works emerge from a deeply personal negotiation with the body: as a non-binary individual, the artist has long contemplated mastectomy while confronting the limitations of public health systems that remain bound to binary definitions of gender. Within such frameworks, top surgery is typically prescribed only as a step toward “full” transition into masculinity or femininity, leaving non-binary subjectivities suspended in a space of exclusion. The paintings become both a sublimation of desire and an indictment of the structural repression of gender self-determination within heteronormative contexts.

The series also revisits childhood memories, most notably the haunting image from Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern in which girls bind their feet to restrict growth. Echoing this gesture, the artist recalls binding their chest in an attempt to arrest development and preserve an androgynous appearance. Initiated during the first wave of COVID-19, the series now encompasses nearly thirty works, created through processes of repetition and variation.

The earliest paintings dwell on skin, nipples, and the tattoos that have long marked the artist’s body, their hyperrealism underscoring the intimacy of self-scrutiny. Gradually, the imagery shifts toward increasingly abstracted close-ups, scar-like forms that allude to the imagined traces of a mastectomy—residues of a transformation at once unattainable and urgently desired. Across the series, the artist offers a poignant meditation on embodiment, identity, and the politics of visibility, transforming personal struggle into a broader reflection on the violence of normative structures and the resilience of self-invention.

THE SOCIETY OF DANGEROUS EVIDENCE:
DYKES ON BIKES 2.0
October 4–12, 2025
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Opening Event · October 7, 2025 · 6:00 p.m.
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Venue · Fotograf Zone Gallery
Jungmannova 19/7, 110 00, Prague 1
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Hours · 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.

Marta Orlando

is a visual artist working between Berlin and Palermo. She studied architecture in Naples and later trained under Douglas Gordon at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. In her work, she combines painting, writing, video, installations, and participatory forms, including tattooing. She explores the perception of space, identity, and gender through a personal and experimental lens.

#49 Talk Together

This issue explores language – its forms, possibilities, and limits. We look at how we communicate in the digital space, how the language of artificial intelligence changes our notions of creativity, and how visual images can replace words. You will discover why language is never neutral and how it shapes identity, creates inequalities, and opens paths to liberation. The issue features a reflection by bell hooks, the artistic practice of Eszter Magyar, projects documenting the Roma community in Brno, and visual essays by Claudia Larcher and Tabor Robak. The magazine presents language as a tool of communication, power, and resistance and invites you to reflect on what it truly means to talk to one another today.