Maï Diallo

A video shows us a part of ourselves that is almost unrecognizable—the insides of the human body. The screen projecting the image is pierced by several metal instruments: typical gynaecological speculum. During the nineteenth century, many Black women were subjected to medical experiments by practitioners such as J. Marion Sims, who is known in history as the father of modern gynaecology. Sims invented the earliest known prototype of the speculum on the back of a series of morbid experiments and non-consensual surgery without anaesthesia carried out on enslaved Black women, who, according to Sims, did not feel pain in the same way as white women. The speculum is an instrument still used in gynaecological examinations despite its violent origins against gestating racialized bodies. The legacy of modern medicine passes on values from the racist heteropatriarchal system based on binary thinking and differential treatment in accordance with the valuation of individual bodies.
In a sculptural gesture that reflects the gruesome legacy of this instrument, Maï Diallo breaks the screen, piercing and opening the image, positioning the viewer in the intimate interior of the body—like yet another internal organ subjected to the violence that still persists today. Diallo’s installation takes over the space, playing visually, sonically, sculpturally and sensorially between the digital and the physical worlds.