CAROLIN MEYER reviews Grumpy, Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s unsettling Somerset House Studios commission on intimacy in the digital age.
With the destination of Somerset House Studios looming on the horizon, I found myself re-reading the event-series’ title: Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy. It had spoken to me as it brought into focus the impossibility of being an oozing, ageing body in the 21st century. And not just a body, but a mind, too, that had responded to the ‘always-on’ culture with burnout and mental ill-health.
Reaching deep into the ether of the online search engine, I had retrieved information about the biannual series, commissioned and produced by Somerset House Studios, dating as far back as 2020. The series links its genesis to 24/7: A WAKE-UP CALL FOR OUR NON-STOP WORLD, an exhibition with an urgent and resonating title at Somerset House Studios the year before, this serves as a reminder that we were already exhausted in 2019. While the focus of the series, pre-Covid, was on the pressure to be productive, the post-Covid focus seems to have shifted towards a more general examination of the intersections of well-being and societal shifts, now also incorporating the impact of ecological change alongside that of technology. Can this be read as a sign of our collective resignation with tech as our true ‘new normal’, seeing that it kept our globalised world oh-so-connected during the pandemic?
Stepping into the digital, hyperpersonal and ultra-intimate world of Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s digital commission, Grumpy, I sensed in the rendered figure this same resignation. But first: surprise, familiarity, but the familiar made strange, reminded of those upside-down chins that resemble faces, adding absurdity, humour, and perhaps feelings of vertigo to the viewer’s experience. Made strange because the upside-down figure in Grumpy, the ‘chinface’ as it appeared from where I was sat, packed tightly between other bodies, sang a familiar song:
Sunny
Yesterday my life was filled with rain
Sunny
You smiled at me and really eased the pain
The dark days are gone, and the bright days are here
My sunny one shines so sincere
Sunny, one so true
I love you.
The artist worked alongside an anatomist to dissect a body donated for research, and a medical artist to cast its sexual and reproductive organs. For the video, the wax model was combined with a sculpted 3D character, giving it a translucent, sex toy-adjacent silicone glow. The organs, too, have been reproduced in glistening glare, revealing an oblivious foetus nestled in the body’s cut-open middle. Pink and squishy, it contrasts a drill-like metal spinal column behind, pointing to the ad absurdum of our porous, organic bodies sleeping next to metal-encased lithium every night.
Conjuring up Renaissance imagery of religious figures through the mannerist positioning of the waxy legs and the subject of mother and child, the digital medium questions the changing role of human agency under technosocial transformations. As part of a long art historical canon of reclining “slashed beauties”, Grumpy joins the ranks of the Anatomical Venus, first laid out in state by wax artists in 18th century Florence. At the time, wax models were not just intended to render human dissection obsolete, by way of their removable intestines and demountable layers, but also to represent aesthetic and sexualised beauty through their odourless cadavers.
Whilst Hansen has created the first Anatomical Venus with a voice, the figure in Grumpy does not seem any more in control of her own destiny than her predecessors. Instead, this contemporary version speaks to the state of being blamed for one’s own objectification, as the work’s title suggests. Putting the onus of being grumpy and detached onto the figure itself rather than considering the structural, technosocial conditions it is shaped by, speaks to the hyperindividual, neoliberal and supremacist mindset that puts some people’s worth below that of others. The voice of Hansen’s character consists only of snippets and sound bites. Whilst they have given historically marginalised voices a platform, digital technologies changed the way we think: in (dis)associative algorithmic ways with an eroded ability to focus on anything, never mind on our physical surroundings.
From our own felt and lived experiences of ‘going online’ or, rather, permanently being online and offline, we know that the internet did not deliver the early techno-fantasies of escaping the fleshy confines of the body, and that crucially there is no ‘going online’ without the body. Victoria Comstock-Kershaw (@rothkosgirlfriend) called it “metacartesianism” in the Spring 2025 edition of The Toe Rag. Others refer to it as dualism 2.0—the dualism of living and longing in an online / offline world.
The next shot, which zooms in on the oblivious foetus, is accompanied by the piano melody of Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”. The last note extended, the sound of the index finger slipping off the keys leaves an echo that is repeated in the next scene. The figure is now shown in darkness, not even illuminated by an artificial moonlight. The sonata is about Beethoven’s love for his 16-year-old lover and student, Giulietta Guicciardi, whom he was not allowed to marry. In a similar vein, Grumpy is described as an unrequited declaration of love. The love we pour into our phones with its infinite possibilities to make us feel held, hopeful, and happy, nevertheless is unrequited and underscored by a not-yet-learned, but already aired staccato—the potential of playing the whole piano song remains incomplete. Like the seemingly severed head from the body that calls forth in us the state of being in limbo— of limerence lingering. A digital life of longing whilst the body withers away, hunched over screens, too wired to concentrate. Nor here nor there, just in-between, whilst we wait for real life to begin. The online world has made waiting rooms out of our physical realms.
In the next scene, the figure sings: “When will I fuck you in real life?”. With the head metaphorically in the cloud(s), or sonically submerged in water, the figure is so detached that we sense a disconnect between the mind and the body. With the figure already succumbing to the solipsistic pull of the ‘social’, perhaps we are meant to think of the unborn child as prone to being phubbed, a portmanteau of the words ‘phone’ and ‘snubbed’ (a term extensively discussed by the sociologist Sherry Turkle in relationship to relationships). It will likely be born into a world where people are encouraged to long for what’s just out of reach, on our screens, in our heads. Is the disconnect the consequence of tasting the fruit of digitally-fuelled narcissism? Of mindlessly following what temporarily eases our pain?
This work screams, silently, like the ubiquitous Edvard Munch painting, WE ARE NOT JUST FUNCTIONAL. Not just here to exist virtually, but in desperate need to live and revel in the flesh, with agency. Sexual pleasure cannot be automated, as Grumpy’s destiny of being a body in digital limbo seems to plead to us to comprehend. “Embrace and never let go, let go”, the figure sings now. With eyes closed to the world, focused on the mind’s eye instead, it seems so intent on its own detachment—on being a dutiful body in the techno-industrial complex—that we are reminded of ourselves cradling our phones as if they are newborns. Humming “Oh, sweet love”, as if we can squeeze out of the cold rectangles what we crave: connection, love, validation. In a world of phubbers, we turn not to each other, but to our own phones. The sequence repeats three times and the video ends.
With tensions of inside, outside, and online, offline at play, Bodies and the Industrial Complex left in its wake other questions of what makes an art event worth leaving the house for? The announcement that, right after the screening, Grumpy was going to be made publicly available on Somerset House Studio’s online platform further cemented the unresolved tensions of the event itself. Of course, the prospect of an IRL conversation between other bodies, which potentially settles some of those tensions, or at least provides room for a collective licking of the structural wound, can be motivating enough to attend an event in person.
And so we were released back into the wild, left to our smart devices. What lingered was how art spaces are walking the tightrope between authenticity offline and taking recordings for marketisation online, where the work, Grumpy, was intended to live from the start.
Grumpy was released on 28 January 2025 at Somerset House Studios. Featured image taken from digital commission, courtesy of artist.