Nowadays, there is this bewildering variant of reality TV: when you unwarily turn on the TV, it can happen that you land smack in the middle of some open heart surgery, or, perhaps less spectacularly, an operation to remove a gallstone. Surgery TV; unashamedly you are shown close-ups of a razor-sharp surgical knife slicing through pink flesh, and then the bloody and throbbing intestines of a total stranger. The flesh is skilfully folded aside and expert fingers rummage through the hollows and organs of an anonymous body, in search of a growth or infection. Meanwhile, a comforting voice-over explains the surgeon's actions.

What is the dark, perverse fascination which is evoked by these pornographic images? Do they provide a more in-depth 'understanding' of our body? Or rather, do they give us satisfaction because they concern someone else, a stranger? Can we bear to look at them because the clinical setting turns the body into an object? Or is it the pleasure of feeling our flesh creep, precisely because we can identify with this body of which we are shown the most intimate parts?

Atlas of the Interior elaborates on this complex interaction of contradictory desires and feelings. Before you enter the dark room where the action takes place, you are urgently requested to put on a doctor's white coat: the first sign that you are about to embark on a precarious escapade which will involve more than the purely artistic viewing pleasure, which can sometimes be so comfortable. Once your eyes have become accustomed to the darkness, you can see slides of detailed cross-sections of the human body, projected onto various surfaces including yourself or anyone else present. There is a monitor onto which you look down, as if onto an (operating) table, above which a second screen is suspended, so that your glance gets entangled in the images, animations made up from the same material as the projections.

A voice can be heard: "So this is what I look like from the inside. It remains abstract. I still have no idea what he looked like...". Is it referring to 'me', or to 'him'? Who is 'he', then? It is 'Joseph', an American murderer, given the death penalty in the state of Texas, who donated his body to science. 'Just like meat.' Science turned Joseph inside-out and cut his body up into 2000 wafer-thin slices, which were then digitalized and put on the Internet.

What is the dark, perverse fascination which is evoked by these pornographic images? Do they provide a more in-depth 'understanding' of our body? Or rather, do they give us satisfaction because they concern someone else, a stranger? Can we bear to look at them because the clinical setting turns the body into an object? Or is it the pleasure of feeling our flesh creep, precisely because we can identify with this body of which we are shown the most intimate parts?

Atlas of the Interior elaborates on this complex interaction of contradictory desires and feelings. Before you enter the dark room where the action takes place, you are urgently requested to put on a doctor's white coat: the first sign that you are about to embark on a precarious escapade which will involve more than the purely artistic viewing pleasure, which can sometimes be so comfortable. Once your eyes have become accustomed to the darkness, you can see slides of detailed cross-sections of the human body, projected onto various surfaces including yourself or anyone else present. There is a monitor onto which you look down, as if onto an (operating) table, above which a second screen is suspended, so that your glance gets entangled in the images, animations made up from the same material as the projections.

A voice can be heard: "So this is what I look like from the inside. It remains abstract. I still have no idea what he looked like...". Is it referring to 'me', or to 'him'? Who is 'he', then? It is 'Joseph', an American murderer, given the death penalty in the state of Texas, who donated his body to science. 'Just like meat.' Science turned Joseph inside-out and cut his body up into 2000 wafer-thin slices, which were then digitalized and put on the Internet.

Atlas of the Interior is both revealing and degrading by the clinical insight it provides into a man being degenerated into a mere thing. But at the same time, nothing is resolved because, despite the hyper-realistic images, the mystery of the body, 'the interior', remains a secret. As a collection of data, it gives nothing away. "How would it feel to stand here now if you knew the man, if you loved the man?" The comments, alternately very personal, referring to 'I' or 'you', or detached, referring to 'he', constantly create confusion, and turn you from a visitor in a public place into a voyeur or intruder. But of what? Of Joseph or yourself? Tan challenges us to assume a painful position.

Jorinde Seijdel