Orlan

ORLAN is a French multi-media artist who uses sculpture, photography, performance, video, video games, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and robotics as well as scientific and medical techniques such as surgery and biotechnology to question modern social phenomena.

She has said that her art is not body art, but 'carnal art,' which lacks the suffering aspect of body art.

Since the 1960s and the 1970s, ORLAN has questioned the status of the body and the political, religious, social, and traditional pressures that are inscribed in it.

Her work denounces the violence done to the body and in particular to women's bodies, and thus engages in a feminist struggle.

She makes her body the privileged instrument where our own relationship to otherness is played out.

This work of Orlan on the body is done in particular by the means of photography.

In 1976, for example, she walked the streets wearing a dress on which her naked body was represented.

In the same period, in Portugal, she offered photos glued to wood and cut out corresponding to pieces of herself: an arm, a piece of breast, etc.

In 1977, ORLAN performed Kiss of the artist (Baiser de l'artiste), during the International Fair of Contemporary Art (FIAC ), in the Grand Palais in Paris.

ORLAN displayed a life-size photograph of her own nude torso, which she sat behind.

The life-sized photograph was turned into a slot machine.

A spectator would insert a coin and could see it descending to the groin before being awarded a kiss from the artist herself.

The installation created a scandal that cost the artist her teaching position.

In 1978, she created the International Symposium of the Performance in Lyon, which she animated until 1982.

In 1982, with Frédéric Develay, she created the first online magazine of contemporary art, Art-Accès-Revue, on Minitel.

This magazine invites international artists working in situ and/or with conceptual problems to create original works specially conceived on Minitel, by Minitel, and for Minitel.

Many of the works play with the Videotex graphic style or ironically imitate Minitel services (Bernar Venet, Vera Molnár, Ben, François Morellet, Daniel Buren...)

The works are accompanied by critical essays.

The service also regularly gives the floor to the public.

A public presentation of this database took place at the Centre Pompidou during the exhibition Les Immatériaux by Jean-François Lyotard.

The Art-Access service has been distributed free of charge by the city of Metz server: MIRABEL.

Her manifesto of "carnal art" (Manifeste de l'Art Charnel) is followed by a series of surgical operations- performances that she carries out between 1990 and 1993.

With this series, the body of the artist becomes a place of public debate.

These surgical operations - performances were widely publicized and provoked a strong polemic, although they represent only a tiny part of her integral work.

ORLAN also explores the use of new technologies in the arts.

In her work of the late 1990s and early 2000s, "Self-Hybridations", the artist, through digital photography and computer graphics editing software, hybridizes faces from different cultures (Native American, pre-Columbian, African).

Orlan then attempted to further expand the boundaries of contemporary art by using biotechnology to create an installation entitled Harlequin Coat made from the artist's own cells and cells of human and animal origin.

At the same time, ORLAN taught at the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy.

In addition, the beginning of the video clip of the homonymous song shows Lady Gaga made up and decapitated recalling her "Woman with head" executed in 1996.

The artist sought $31.7 million in compensation.

In 2005, she was awarded a one-year residency at the ISCP in New York by l'Association française d'action artistique (AFAA), and in 2006 she was invited to Los Angeles for a residency at the Getty Research Institute, the Getty Center's research laboratory.

For ORLAN, the American star, in the album Born This Way released in 2011, was too freely inspired by her "hybridizations".

In June 2013, she filed a complaint against Lady Gaga for plagiarism.

She received the Grand Prix de le-Réputation 2013, organized by Alexia Guggemos in the visual arts category, which rewards the most popular personalities on the internet, alongside Philippe Starck and Yann Arthus-Bertrand

The plea hearing had been set for July 7, 2016, at the Paris high court.

A first verdict was announced in the disadvantage of ORLAN, who then had to pay 20,000 euros to the singer, but the artist decided to appeal.

In May 2018, the Paris Court of Appeal dismissed ORLAN by confirming the absence of the parasitic nature of the video clip incriminated.

Orlan was ordered to pay 10,000 euros, as costs incurred, to Lady Gaga.

Since October 18, 2018, ORLAN is represented in France by the Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery in Paris.

In 2019, she was a member of the jury of the Opline Prize, the first online contemporary art prize.