Mike Parr, Edelweiß

Mike Parr was born in 1945 in Sydney, and grew up on a farm which his parents had purchased in the Australian hinterland. Right after his birth the doctor amputated the lower part of Parr’s arm without even asking the mother. This was never to be discussed in the family, and he was treated as if he had been born with just one arm. Mike Parr takes his own identity as a starting point and unfolds a both confrontational and mystical artistic language of the radical that revolves around the psycho-social dimensions of the self and the community, subjectivity and memory, the issue of human existence and its control. Mike Parr relies on shock, pain, disgust, and taboo to activate the public and to stimulate it to discuss issues of art and ethics.