I visited the Alien Encounters exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, it featured a collection of solo shows all centred on the theme of identity and what it means to be alien. Each piece evokes the sense of the ‘other’ and how this is portrayed in different ways, including an othering of the human.

The two pieces that struck me were Danai Anesiadou’s ‘Don’t commit suicide just because you are afraid of death’ and Rana Hamadeh’s ‘The Fugitive Image’. Anesiadou’s piece was of particular interest, focusing on the creation of a surreal purgatory and the in-between to reflect that of Greece’s current economic situation. Anesiadou presents vacuum formed/injection moulded bodies and body parts that adorn the architecture of the space, turning the body into an ornament of unknowing in the act of removing the elements of humanity. The bodies/body parts are presented as void of texture with all aspects of the human removed; such as the hair, skin colour, eyes, clothes. Alongside these Anesiadou has created sculptures of the plastic vacuumed personal belongings of friends who haven’t fled Greece, these again reduce the human to an object of their belongings and by vacuum packing this creates an othering/weirdness in the removal of humanity.

Hamadeh’s piece contained an element I was drawn to, the work centres around exploration of Egypt and the wider Arab world today as told through the story of 2 female serial killers in Egypt in the 1920s. As part of the display of the work the sets and props have been laid out in the gallery space, as part of this it details each of the protagonists of the piece which includes ‘Arm-Apparatus’. ‘The arm-apparatus is a mutant organ-in-excess that attaches itself at all time throughout the play to the bodies of the female protagonists. An organ that is neither a fragment of a lost unity nor in itself and entirely differentiated totality, the arm-apparatus’s role is to externalise the functions of wilfulness and depravity that are____ummm____inherent to the female body, turning these functions into legal code.’ This is an interesting concept of turning a human body part into something that is entirely non-human; turning it into an object that has a different agency and being, an otherness that is a ‘mutant’ to the body.