Hello, today I’m going to talk about an artist that called ORLAN.  She is a French artist, born 30 May of 1947 in Saint-Etienne, Loire; but nowadays she lives and works in Los Angeles, New York and Paris. Her real name is Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte, but, she always sign her work has “ORLAN” in capital letters. She is famous because of her performance work with plastic surgery in the early to mid-1990s, but she had a lot of other different art work that could be interesting to check out. 

I her beginnings in 1964, she used to work the performance art with some exercise that she called “Marches au ralenti” in which she walked in slow motions march between two central parts of her home town Saint-Étienne. Then in 1965 she  performend the “MesuRages” in which she use her own body as a measuring instrument and measure how many people she could find using her "Orlan-body" as a unit of measurement.

 In 1978 her performance “the Head of Medusa” was really controversial too,  she used the well know Freud’s phrase  "at the sight of the vulva, even the devil runs away, ” and  displayed her sexual organs under a magnifying glass during menstruation at the Museum Ludwig in Aachen.

In 1971 she baptized herself as  “Sainte-Orlan” a  conceptual name that she will developed later in the 90’ in her famous and renowned art work “the reincarnation of Saint Orlan”, that involves a series of plastic surgeries that transformed herself into elements from paintings and sculptures of women in the art history, as a part of that later would be  her 'Carnal Art' manifesto.