One take: Luke Willis Thompson '_Human'

Abstract

Article reviews Luke Willis Thompson's 35mm film '_Human' (2018) exhibited at Kunsthalle Basel in Germany. Explores the work's depictions of 'My Mother, My Father, My Sister, My Brother' (1997), a sculpture by the late artist Donald Rodney, and both artists' degenerative hereditary illnesses through the use of film and editing processes. Considers Thompson's concerns with "racial epidermal schema" within the colonial modern, colonialism's "lingering presence upon the body", the role of science and medicine in establishing biological racism, and its enduring legacy through surveillance technologies.