Bloodletting, self-immolation, staged suicides, humiliation, and objectification of self – what more could one ask for in an art exhibition? Sex, I suppose, but let’s not lose focus too quickly. Installed in various locations throughout campus, last week’s “I Am the Medium” exhibition featured eight recorded performance pieces that explored the charged social and political themes of identity, ritual, mortality, and self-sacrifice through art performed on the artists’ body.

Psychologically and emotionally heavier than the usual, pretty-pictures-on-a-wall routine, “I Am the Medium” proved to be an intellectual assault, forcing the viewer to rethink their collective understandings of such things as beauty and suffering.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect is the artists deliberate display of their weakness and fragility. Polish artist Katarzyna Kozyra actually taped herself receiving chemotherapy for lymphoma completely nude, posing as the prostitute from Manet’s controversial work Olympia, while Dutch artist Mathilde ter Heijne staged her suicide by throwing a life-size dummy of herself off a bridge. Virtually everyone’s initial reaction to the works was bewilderment; Why would these artists intentionally do this to themselves?

The reasoning, however, became much clearer upon watching Italian artist Franko B.’s blood drip down the walls on the sixth floor of HSSB in nerve-shattering silence.

Pain is an affirmation of life. It is a celebration of human life.

Crazy as it sounds, it does make some discernable sense. Kozyra subverts the notion of the ideal female figure versus the real female figure by making sexual poses in such a fragile setting, and in doing so shatters the concept of an ideal female figure altogether. By staging her suicide, ter Heijne breaks social gender roles by ridding herself of suicidal desire with her wax dummy and clearly advocates against suicide in the name of love. Franko B.’s bloodletting is a physical manifestation of his emotional turbulence.

I could continue to spout artistic interpretation, but what fun would that be? Think about it. Take what you want from it.

There is a message that resonates loudly in the blood and flesh of these prominent artists: In embracing pain, struggle, and humiliation comes liberation and the strength to endure.