BODY TALK is the record of a shared journey, shaped by quests, encounters and discoveries along the way. Conceived and developed together by the artist Nives Wider and the critic J. Emil Sennewald, the book unfolds as a convivium: a gathering around a shared table where images, ideas and experiences meet, circulate and resonate.

Alongside essays by J. Emil Sennewald, Hartmut Böhme and Christiane Druml which engage in dialogue with Nives Widauer’s works, the book explores the visceral responses images can evoke—their emotional impact, the gut feelings they provoke, and even the possibility of swallowing an image. The dialogue expands through the voices of medical and science historian Michael Hagner, curators Natalia Marin and Chus Martínez, and philosopher Ludger Schwarte who respond to five questions about their perceptions of the body. Widauer herself leads the exchange, answering the same questions.

At the core of the book lies Widauer’s series of overdrawn anatomical etchings, “Paracelsus | Body Talk”, which deals with Paracelsus’s notion of Ein-Bildung: the physical process by which images take shape within us. This creates a resonant space in which the various contributions and Widauer’s work encounter and affect one another, presented through a significant corpus of work exploring the human body throughout the artist’s career. Rather than speaking about the flesh from a distance, BODY TALK creates a space in which different forms of knowledge, perception, and imagination converge, challenge one another, and open up new ways of seeing.