FEATURES – Art and Medicine Dialogues
3raum Anatomietheater Vienna, October 2010

The FEATURES – Vienna Face Project is being developed within a particular Viennese context and related with people who influence my work and are part of my life. FEATURES is the second art based study together with Manfred Frey, head of the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Medical University Vienna (MUV), his team of surgeons and two patient groups, breast cancer and facial paralyzed patients. In his book Snapshot Versions of Life (1987) Richard Chalfen analyzes what “we ‘do’ when understanding a picture” (125). Frame-severed people, places, materials and social relationships play a crucial role during my fieldwork activities in the surgical operating theaters. As operators – artists, surgeons, ethnographers and even patients or informants – we create manifold framing events…

Photograph: Christina Lammer