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Bju:tiful?
Workshop with young people exploring ideas of the body, beauty, and normality – from colonial and racist systems of knowledge to AI-generated images and transhumanist visions of the future. (Anne Hemkendreis + Hannimari Jokinen)
From conceptions of the “people’s body” to the obsession with beauty and AI immortality, a workshop with upper secondary school students
In Bju:tiful?, we explore how historical notions of the “people’s body” give rise to contemporary images of the beautiful, the normal and, ultimately, the technologically optimised or even immortal body. We are interested in who has shaped these notions, which bodies are made visible, and which remain excluded. We trace historical trajectories from colonial and racist structures of knowledge to contemporary visual worlds – from advertising and social media to AI technologies and transhumanist visions of the future.
The workshop is developed as part of the exhibition We Have Never Been Only Human and understands the exhibition venue itself to be part of this history. The Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité is not only a place where knowledge is displayed, but also a place where knowledge about bodies has been produced. Anthropometric measurements, anthropological collections and scientific classifications have played a decisive role in shaping notions of “normality” and difference. We address this history and ask how its images and categories continue to shape the present.
In the workshop, we combine historical photographs, anthropometric instruments and colonial image archives with contemporary phenomena such as beauty filters, AI-generated images and transhumanist visions of the future. We are interested in why images are so powerful and how they shape our ideas about bodies, identities and belonging.
Together with upper secondary school students, we develop a creative writing process that brings historical materials into dialogue with personal experiences and observations. Using images as a starting point, the participants create short texts and poetic works that question established narratives and open up new perspectives. This process is complemented by photographic experiments with transparent face masks that make Western and media-driven ideals of beauty and the body visible while simultaneously interrogating them.
The texts and portraits created during the workshop will become part of the exhibition at the finissage on 12 June 2027. They offer further perspectives on issues of representation, othering, racism and technological control of the body, illustrating how historical images of humanity continue to shape the present – and how they can be critically re-examined and retold.
Text by Anne Hemkendreis and Hannimari Jokinen.
Anne Hemkendreis is an art historian and Hannimari Jokinen is an artist and curator.
Work in the exhibition
03 Bju:tiful?, 2026/2027: Workshop for young people. The workshop results will be presented at the finissage.
Anne Hemkendreis
Anne Hemkendreis is an art historian and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Greenhouse – Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger. Her research examines how art and visual culture shape colonial and postcolonial regimes of knowledge and how these continue to inform the present. Her work focuses in particular on colonialism in the Arctic, representations of contemporary Sámi art, and Indigenous cosmologies in art and visual culture. Drawing on scholarly, ethnographic, and artistic images, she examines how concepts of the human, nature, and cultural difference are produced and continue to shape museums, archives, and social discourses. Profile page Anne Hemkendreis
Hannimari Jokinen
Hannimari Jokinen is a visual artist and curator. Her work engages with cultures of remembrance, memorial sites in public space, and strategies of decolonisation. Through site-specific and participatory artistic formats, she deconstructs power relations embedded in established images, monuments, and built environments that shape European historical consciousness. Her work also examines the memories of colonised people, which she transforms, through participatory and multidirectional approaches, into narrative and spatial constellations. Her works offer alternative perspectives on memory and cultural heritage.