Screen Bodies

In Screen Bodies, Kate Cooper explores how contemporary crises are bound to the contested category of the body as a site through which power is organised, enforced, and resisted. Building on Kate's ongoing interest in imaging the body, this new audiovisual installation comprises animated medical imagery produced in response to a soundscape by her long-term collaborator, composer and theatre maker Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure, exploring questions of embodiment, representation, and governance.

The work is conceived in dialogue with the recorded voices of friends, family members, and a speech made

by Aliya Rahman, who was forcibly detained by ICE in Minneapolis in January 2026. Screen Bodz·es examines how bodies are regulated and subjected within contemporary regimes of dehumanisation, racialisation, and technology.

The animated visual language of Screen Bodies utilises found archival medical imagery. Cellular images, anatomical structures, and diagnostic fragments appear alongside shadow forms that obscure, refuse identification, and vanish. Drawing on material from Western medical processes, the work opens up questions of intrusion, visibility, and control, considering both the internal systems of the human body and the broader systems of care and punishment through which bodies are categorised and managed. Bonaventure's soundtrack juxtaposes abrasive synths with speech that loops, fragments, and recedes, conceived as a site of relation between irreconcilable experiences. 

Through dialogues with her childhood friend, pathologist Dr Katherine Brougham, Kate traces the tactics and choreographies of cancer as it moves through the body. This account sits alongside conversations between the artist and her six-year-old daughter, in which questions

of fascism, history, everyday life, and implication emerge through the intimate language of parenthood. At the heart of the piece is Kate's ongoing collaboration with writer and researcher Rahila Haque, who reads her evolving text, Strange Reverabations/The Same Parts.

In Screen Bodies, Kate addresses the difficulty of image­making and corporeal representation through conversation, reflecting on how inherited and ongoing systems of political violence shape both individual and collective responsibility. Turning towards abstraction, the work considers how these regimes render the body a contested site for the possibility of life itself.


Animation: Theo Cook

Soundtrack: Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure

Voices: Dr Katherine Brougham, Sadie Cook, Rahila Haque, and Aliya Rahman

Thanks to: Somerset House Studios