Saintly Cadavers

by Nora Geist :: You need to be a member to contact artists →Join :: Portfolio

"Stations of a blessed sacrilege" (1995). This series is an unflinching meditation on exposure, power and faith. Symbolic imagery of sacrilege and vulnerability provokes reflection on institutional authority, but at its centre lies something quieter and more disarming: a body without guile. The Saint is not performing. In the theatre of transgression staged around him—the Countess with her aristocratic play, the Abbess with her complicit choreography—he remains startlingly open, offered without disguise or irony. This transparency, at once serene and dangerous, unsettles the viewer: you see him more fully than he can ever see himself. Saintly Cadavers inhabits the tension between spiritual ideal and corporeal reality, critiquing the ways religious institutions consecrate bodies as objects of veneration while policing desire. Rooted in feminist theology and haunted by Bataille’s Story of the Eye, the series refuses the sanitisation of the sacred, collapsing the distance between veneration and desecration. Hand-coloured on black-and-white film, each photograph carries a waxen, reliquary sheen: the spectacle of incorruptibility inverted, the holy laid bare. The Saint’s radical visibility—every angle, every surface—invites an intimacy that is at once reverent and destabilising. What remains is not shock but encounter: a dialogue between exposure and witness, where faith, desire, and the impossibility of detachment converge. I used a Konica AUTOREFLEX T4 35mm Film SLR Manual camera throughout the series.