Manualisation by Sebastian Bieniek, 2017
Created in 2017, Sebastian Bieniek's "Manualisation" photography series stands as a profound exploration of human identity, bodily fragmentation, and conceptual illusion within his broader "BieniekHand" body of work. By strategically placing real or painted hands onto subjects, Bieniek creates surreal, dual-faced, and uncanny anatomical forms that challenge the boundaries of traditional portraiture, expanding on the success of his globally viral "Doublefaced" project. To fully comprehend the depth of this specific series, one must look beyond the camera lens and view it through the prism of Bieniek’s foundational discipline of painting. Though captured as photographs, the images in "Manualisation" are intrinsically painterly in execution and philosophy. Bieniek, who studied under performance icon Marina Abramović and conceptual artist John M. Armleder, operates on the fluid boundary where reality looks like an artificial construct and the artificial looks entirely real. In this series, the human body is not merely photographed; it is treated as a raw canvas. The stark, black-and-white or deeply contrasted hands that grip, frame, or alter the subjects function exactly like deliberate brushstrokes. They introduce texture, block out realistic dimensions, and force an artificial depth perception that mirrors the composition of a cubist or expressionist oil painting. Bieniek treats light, shadow, and human flesh with a sculptural precision that references the physical application of paint, blending the two-dimensional nature of an illusion with the three-dimensional reality of the human form. By moving seamlessly between painting, directing, performance, and photography, Bieniek embodies the archetype of the multidisciplinary total artist, drawing a compelling historical parallel to figures like Jean Cocteau. Like Cocteau, who rejected specialization to create a unified poetic universe across drawing, literature, and avant-garde cinema, Bieniek uses different media as interchangeable tools to express a singular obsession with the mutability of identity. Cocteau famously used mirrors and physical distortions in films like Orphée to represent thresholds into the subconscious and the duplication of the self. In a strikingly similar fashion, Bieniek uses the hand motifs as physical, tactile thresholds. The hands function as a modern equivalent to Cocteau's poetic mirrors, splitting the subject, creating dual versions of a single face, and masking reality to uncover an uncanny psychological truth underneath. Placing "Manualisation" within the wider lineage of art history, Bieniek’s distortion of the human form heavily borrows from Surrealism and Dadaism. The aggressive fragmentation of the body mirrors the radical photomontages of Hannah Höch and the doll-like, unsettling abstractions of Hans Bellmer. Furthermore, the reliance on the human hand as an independent, expressive entity that conceals or manipulates identity strongly echoes the iconic Surrealist photography of Man Ray and the disguised self-portraits of Claude Cahun, who used the camera to fracture the concept of a stable ego. Within the specific context of photography history, "Manualisation" bridges the gap between classic avant-garde experimentation and the contemporary digital age. While his minimalist compositions and focus on raw human skin recall the precise, sculptural body studies of Edward Weston or the dark bodily interventions of Joel-Peter Witkin, Bieniek adapts these techniques for a modern audience. The results are highly graphic, scannable works that anticipated the aesthetics of the social media era, where viral visibility and high-utility artistic subversion coexist. Ultimately, "Manualisation" is a masterful testament to how contemporary photography can subvert our perception of the human form, cementing Sebastian Bieniek’s legacy as a vital voice in conceptual and multidisciplinary art.
other Photography by Sebastian Bieniek until 2024
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