Forensic Strategies Against the Traumatic Condition of Culture: Exposure of Wounded Bodies in Brazilian Media and Art

Images of dead or wounded bodies are a cultural taboo and at the same time strong attractors for visual attention. This paper will discuss this ambivalence as a key to understanding the relation between body and image in contemporary visual culture. In recent Brazilian history, reappropriated media images of victims of social violence have made subversive revelation of the political repressive violence of torture and assassination systematically concealed by the authorities. In works of the visual artist Rosângela Rennó, the exposed body carries a tension between a generalized traumatic ‘wound culture’ and what will be defined as a forensic paradigm of images of memory and death. The ambiguity between images that touch the spectator and images that hurt him is explored in works that establish a critical distance from the traumatic condition, avoiding shortcuts to its aesthetic effects of shock and horror.