Fabulous Harlequin: ORLAN and the Patchwork Self

For four decades the internationally renowned French artist ORLAN has interrogated every defining aspect of being human—gender, ethnicity, religion, beauty, physiognomy, and even physiology itself—through an endlessly mutating oeuvre that defies categorization. Performance, sculpture, photography, poetry, design—ORLAN not only creates within these media, she disappears into them, willfully dissolving and reconfiguring her identity through her work.

ORLAN is most famous for her series of cos...