intestines angel

"Intestines Angel" is a photographic experimentation project that fuses corporeal materiality with celestial symbolism, creating an interplay between the visceral and the transcendent.
The project interrogates the body as a site of duality, vulnerability and resilience, grotesqueness and grace, drawing from traditions that consider the human form both as a vessel for suffering and as a medium for transformation.
Historically, artistic representations of the body, particularly in religious iconography, have navigated these tensions, often sanitising or abstracting corporeality to fit spiritual narratives. This project disrupts such conventions, embracing the rawness of bodily reality while maintaining an aura of divinity.

This project operates within theoretical discourses on abjection and the sublime, drawing from Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, wherein fascination and repulsion arise from the collapse of boundaries between self and other, clean and unclean (Kristeva, 1982). The intestines, as a visceral presence in the imagery, evoke this tension, compelling viewers to confront their own reactions to bodily materiality.
In this project, I question how representation engages with bodily presence and decay. By foregrounding the visceral as both immediate and conceptual, the project engages in a dynamic interrogation of embodiment, offering a visual language that challenges entrenched perceptions of the body’s role in artistic discourse.
By confronting viewers with the intersection of materiality and transcendence, the project invites a reconsideration of the aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical stakes of visualising the body. Through its practice, Intestines Angel disrupts conventional binaries of beauty and grotesqueness, fostering engagement with the visceral as an essential aspect of human and artistic experience.

Intestine Angels is a personal visual interpretation of Jahra’s project,
The World Eater and the World-Shaper, which we photographed together.