ASTORIA, NY.- Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) announces Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body, a major exhibition organized by Sonia Shechet Epstein, opening to the public on March 14, 2026. Taking its title from a Sylvia Plath poem, Overexposed examines how medical imaging technologies—from X-rays and ultrasounds to MRI, CT scans, and endoscopy—have reshaped how we look at, understand, and control the human body.

Featuring 33 historical artifacts, film, and installation-based works, by pioneering artists including Barbara Hammer, Ana Mendieta, Liz Magic Laser, and Donald Rodney, the exhibition interrogates the supposed objectivity of medical imaging tools and the biases, limitations, and cultural implications embedded in how bodies are imaged.

“Every medical image tells a story—not just about health, but about power, vulnerability, and trust,” said Sonia Shechet Epstein, MoMI’s Curator of Science & Technology and Executive Editor, Sloan Science & Film. “Overexposed invites visitors to look beyond the surface of these technologies and consider how our bodies—and our sense of self—are constantly being redefined by the tools that claim to see us most clearly.”

Exhibition Highlights

X-ray technology and cinema debuted to the public on the same day, on December 28, 1895; two inventions that mapped the living body in new ways. Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body traces the evolution of medical imaging from this moment to the present, bringing together research-based, educational, and artist-driven films.

Spanning 1891–2025 and featuring work by 16 artists from 13 countries, the exhibition considers how artists have responded to—and intervened in—the politics and practices of looking inside the body, from overcoming barriers to access to confronting the effects of being imaged.

Overexposed is organized in three distinct yet overlapping sections:

• Technology and Power uses historical materials, educational films, and works of early cinema to explore how the quest for objectivity in Western science and medicine has privileged mechanical optical tools;

• Limits of the Gaze features works by contemporary artists exploring the human desire to see in ways that reveal and challenge the normative gaze embedded in medical imaging; and

• Care and Control highlights artists’ experiences with imaging tools that have transformed the Western practice of medicine.

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s—amid the women’s health movement, second-wave feminism, and the rise of body art—artists such as Barbara Hammer and Ana Mendieta incorporated medical imaging footage into their works, infusing these renderings with subjectivity and personhood. Overexposed will present Mendieta’s X-ray (c. 1975)—the artist’s only film with sound, which shows her skull being imaged through an X-ray device at the instruction of a male doctor—and Hammer’s Sanctus (1990) which makes explicit the latent harm inflicted by X ray exposure.

Other highlights include works by Leslie Thornton, Agnes Questionmark, Panteha Abareshi, Peggy Ahwesh, and Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. The show also includes historical objects, such as X-ray records created in the USSR by bootleggers to inscribe forbidden music.

Key themes explored in Overexposed include the power dynamics of the medical gaze, personal encounters with imaging during illness, women’s health, patient-practitioner spaces, disability visibility, and speculative futures.