Laura Hospes

Her photographs, films and performances are a meticulous record of how she visually dissects, sculpts and manipulates her body into distorted postures. Her work allows her to process the fears, depression, loneliness, self-harm and eating problems she has struggled with since childhood and to break taboos surrounding mental health and unrealistic beauty standards.

Hospes achieved recognition with her project UCP (2015), named after the psychiatric institution where she spent eight months in 2015 following a suicide attempt. Because it was too difficult to talk about her experiences, the camera helped her to express what it is like to teeter on the edge of life and death. In her more recent work, Hospes focuses on the skin, the largest organ of the human body. Inspired by a theory of the French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, Hospes regards the skin as the outermost layer of our mental state.