Disembodied by Intelligence is a multimedia installation exploring language, power, and the fragmented condition of the contemporary body. Combining a multichannel video projection with two suspended sculptures, the work considers how political power operates through the appropriation of language and how larger historical forces can render individual and collective bodies passive. Drawing on early cinematic and theatrical techniques and research into medieval instruments of discipline and torture, the installation asks what role art can play in recovering agency at a moment of political, social, and environmental crisis.
The video reworks Sketches for a Piece on Language and Power, originally commissioned by Prospect Art in 2024, into three short staged scenes exploring the appropriation and redefinition of words such as “life,” “freedom,” and “memory.” Amengual stages these transformations through a deliberately “poor” and grotesque visual language drawn from black light theatre, shadow theatre, and interwar cinema. These archaic and technologically modest forms acknowledge art’s limitations while asking what forms of agency it might nevertheless make possible.
Two mobile sculptures created for the exhibition extend these concerns into physical space. Made of ceramic, wood, and leather straps, they form suspended phrases in cursive script: Dismembered by Capital and Disembodied by Intelligence. Their materials and construction draw on Amengual’s research into medieval instruments of torture and disciplinary technologies, connecting histories of bodily discipline with contemporary experiences of fragmentation and disembodiment. The body they evoke remains intentionally ambiguous: subjective, social, collective, or all of these at once.
At a moment marked by authoritarianism, genocide, environmental destruction, and the erosion of democratic values, Disembodied by Intelligence does not propose art as a straightforward political solution. Instead, it considers art-making as a way of bringing together what has been fragmented and recovering some measure of agency.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Carmen Amengual (Buenos Aires, 1979) is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and independent researcher whose work draws on fragile archives, micro-histories, and oral narratives to examine how histories of resistance circulate and transform over time. Working across experimental cinema, installation, sculpture, sound, and text, she brings incomplete and forgotten materials into the present, exploring the intersections of political memory, biography, and history.
Her recent project A Non-Coincidental Mirror reconstructs the legacy of the Third World Filmmakers Meetings (Algiers, 1973 – Buenos Aires, 1974) while revisiting an unrealized documentary project from the period. The project received a Creative Capital Award (2024), Graham Foundation grants (2023–24), and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts research fellowship (2025). Amengual has participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics Fellowship, and a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Buenos Aires and an MFA in Visual Arts from CalArts.

This exhibition is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture with additional support provided by Yev Kozachuck, CFP® – Financial Advisor at Edward Jones.
Part of this work was developed during a 2024 residency at AUTOMATA, Los Angeles