Kasia Ozga

Save your skin

During the height of the Refugee Crisis of the 2010s, thousands of migrants risked their lives crossing from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe in search of a better life. Many did not survive the dangerous journey. Photographs of lifeless bodies that had washed up on European shores flooded the media. Haunted by this state of affairs, Polish-French-American mixed-media artist Kasia Ozga has recreated a lifeboat that evokes the classical écorché study of the body, muscles without skin. Sauver sa peau/Save Your Skin presents those affected by the danger of sea passage as literally flayed; skin produces a simulacrum of a boat to save them. As a powerful analogy to the perils of crossing, the artist presents a Catch-22 scenario in her poetic soft-sculpture. To be saved, the migrants in question need to lose their skin but if they lose their skin, they cannot be saved.

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