doc, what do you see?, Luka Stojanovic
This work features two primary elements. The first is an X-ray light box made out of two all-white, shadowbox frames with a craft plastic sheet cut and glued along the interior glass. The light for the light boxes is provided by LED light strips mounted along the back, interior lining of the shadowbox frames. The second element is a 34-inch print of a spine on radiographic 'x-ray' paper that is hanging in front of the X-ray lightboxes by an all-white metal clip, mounted directly in the centre of the first light box frame.
Title: doc, what do you see?
Artist: Luka Stojanovic
Date: 2025
Medium/Materials: Multimedia sculpture; craft plastic sheet, shadow box, metal clip, led light strips, radiographic film paper
Dimensions: 101.60 cm x 35.56 cm x 8.26 cm
Form/Genre: Sculpture
Key Terms/Subject/Tags: Chronic illness; Datification; Crip resistance; Patient narrative; Futurities; Autopathography
Artist Statement:
Working across collage, painting, sculpture, and writing, Lukas Stojanovic’s practice explores the mutual relationship between material aesthetics and the continuum of health-illness. Grounded in lived experience navigating multiple non-visible disabilities, his works embrace techniques of abstraction and conceptualism as modes for engaging embodied experiences that exceed regimes of representationalism.
doc, what do you see? (2025) is a multimedia sculpture that invites critical reflection on the possibilities of crip-resistance from with(in) the technologies and logics involved in the visualization/datafication of disabled bodyminds through the biomedical-industrial complex. Recognizing the often-inescapable necessity of ableist biomedical intervention for the treatment of chronic illness, this work plays on the well-worn medical trope of a doctor reading an X-ray to offer their diagnostic assessment of a patient’s condition(s). While the provider-patient relationship staged in this work should evoke a traditional, uneven power imbalance wherein the patient’s experiences are unsurprisingly reduced to data or ‘objective’ markers, an examination of the content and configuration of the traditional materials/technologies of biomedicine suggests points of intervention. The ‘X-ray’ in the work is a real X-ray of the artist’s spine that has been collaged over to change its outward appearance. The stylized ‘X-ray lightbox’ has been separated into two, drawing attention to the inherent artifice of biomedical technologies for properly illuminating objective facts. By creating spaces of futurities ‘otherwise’ within the aesthetic domain, this work asks viewers not only how biomedical materials and technologies delimit their realities, but also how foregrounding embodied agency over their health stories can challenge hegemonic structures and systems of inequality.
Cultural Context / Story Behind the Work:
The work was made in response to over 14 years of navigating the Canadian healthcare system to treat complex chronic illnesses (i.e., chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia), repeatedly being told that there are no biomarkers or concrete data indicators of anything wrong. This is a materialization of resistance, imagining an alternative world in which personal experiences and embodied knowledge come to literally change the 'objective' markers of biomedical science and the practice of medicine.
Rights for this Image:
This digital image is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. You are free to share it for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit the artist.