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The Cultural Frontline: Emily Ratajkowski and the art of the body

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Emily Ratajkowski and the art of the body

22/01/2022 GMT

BBC World Service - The Cultural Frontline, Emily Ratajkowski and the art of the body

Artists on celebrating, injuring, ignoring and transcending the human body

Emily Ratajkowski, Àsìkò, Tadeusz Łysiak and Abi Sheng focus their art on the human body - how it is celebrated, injured, ignored and transcended.

Emily Ratajkowski is an American model, actress, business woman and now writer and artist. She rose to global fame after appearing in Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines music video dancing topless. She says she’s a feminist and at the time said her performance was a form of empowerment. Since then she’s become a mother and written a series of feminist essays exploring body politics. She tells reporter Anna Bailey about her new book, My Body, exploring her relationship with her own body and exploitation in the modelling industry.

Àsìkò is a photographer who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. He tells how research into his Yoruba heritage revealed violence inflicted on women's bodies in the name of tradition. He's conveyed this in a series of striking photographs of men and women - their bodies adorned with vivid arrangements of flowers which symbolise something much uglier.

Tadeusz Łysiak in Poland is the director of the film, The Dress. It looks at the longing and loneliness of a woman of short stature who is constantly made to feel that she does not fit within society's norms of beauty. The Dress has been shortlisted for a 2022 Academy Award in the Live Action Short Film category.

And from bodies to how we clothe them or even transcend them. Chinese designer, or "identity engineer", Abi Sheng sees the future of fashion as being less about traditional garments and more about designing alternative bodies. She uses Artificial Intelligence to add identity fluidity to what we wear. Her recent work, a gender transformative suit, aims to change the appearance of the person wearing it, creating a fluid gender identity - as she explained to  reporter Constanza Hola.

Presenter: Anu Anand
Producer: Paul Waters

(Photo: Emily Ratajkowski. Credit: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)

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