Kunié Suguira. Racks. 1994. Gelatin-silver prints mounted on Plexiglas, metal rack.

Kunié Suguira’s 1994 installation Racks includes photographic postcards of X-rays belonging both to Suguira’s body and others, arranged in a retail-like display that suggests commodity-driven reproducibility. Suguira made the work in response to her hospitalization from a collapsed lung after receiving a stack of her own X-rays with others’ indiscriminately mixed in and discovering that the hospital discarded medical images like hers after 3 years in storage. Suguira’s project gives form to a basic tension at the heart of medical imaging, as X-rays are both an intimate act of mediated visualization and an austere record of the body as object and data point. Suguira’s painterly photogram postcards return these X-rays to an aesthetic space of unknowing and experiencing.