Skin / Deep brings together challenging artistic perspectives on the body in contemporary Irish photography and lens-based media. The featured artists take an expanded view of the social, psychological, and material realities of embodiment – of being a ‘body’ in the world. Through their individual practices, they call into question many fundamental assumptions about how gender, sexuality, and selfhood are manifested in and through the body. As an exhibition, Skin / Deep argues for a reconsideration of those bodily experiences that have long been regarded as marginal, and for the means to address them.

We are all defined as individuals by the norms and expectations of the social context in which we live, but our bodies also provide a position from which to experience the world, and the complexity of how we inhabit our physical selves doesn’t always correspond to existing ideas about what the body is or can be. Using their own experiences, the artists in this exhibition present ways of thinking about the intersections of identity, the body and the self that have only recently begun to be acknowledged in Irish society. They show how different bodily experiences – queer, trans, sick, maternal, migrant – can increasingly claim space in a culture that at one time would have rendered them largely silent and invisible.

The exhibition also functions as a survey of contemporary photographic practices, with the featured artists embracing approaches that push the boundaries of their medium. For better or worse, photography and digital technology have profoundly altered the way we encounter both our own bodies and those of other people, from social media and advertising to dating profiles and hook-up apps. Yet, for the artists in this exhibition, photography and related media also serve to re-centre lived experiences of the body, reflecting on essential, increasingly urgent, questions about what it means to be human.

Curated by Darren Campion, Photo Museum Ireland