Body Editor

Although the internet can appear disconnected from the physical world, the activity that takes place there profoundly shapes how people experience life beyond the screen. In an era defined by social media – where selfhood is increasingly displaced by self-promotion and the glorification of digital beauty undermines authentic self – women are confronted with an ever-widening gap between their real appearance and its idealised digital counterpart. Contemporary technology offers tools that accelerate this process: beauty applications allow users to smooth and contour the face, whiten teeth, adjust height, enlarge eyes, reshape lips, and apply countless other corrections, producing a curated image with little resemblance to the person behind the camera.

Body Editor takes these tools and their cultural consequences as its subject. The project has its roots in Doroszenko’s own ambivalent relationship to images of female beauty – a tension between fascination and unease that runs throughout the work. Inspired by the failures and glitches that occur within popular beauty applications – moments in which artificially perfected bodies collapse into grotesque distortions – Doroszenko constructs large-format photographic collages using a custom-commissioned programme designed to generate errors in digital files. This deliberate introduction of glitch becomes both a technical method and a critical gesture: by exposing the mechanisms through which digital tools construct and normalise the female image, the work invites reflection on the nature of post-photographic representation and the ways technology shapes self-perception. Visible traces of digital processing are left throughout the prints, partly revealing the artist’s working methods and foregrounding the constructed character of every edited image.