Speaking Through the Body Or the enlightenment of pain.
Luna Duran is a body artist whose medium is her own flesh. She was born in the Bolivian Andes where prehispanic ritual practices survive despite centuries of colonization and a palpable tension with modernity. At a young age she migrated to the United States with her parents and became integrated into American culture studying art, photography, and philosophy until she discovered the world of body play which gave a name to a practice of breaking skin. A practice which she had developed privately until that point. Through teachers such as Fakir Musafar she would discover a path which led her back to her roots where these practices of piercing, bloodletting, tattooing and scarification were imbued with meaning and devotion. She began to document her journey of reconnection and reclaiming on her own body with intentional scars earned through physical ordeals after healing from a car accident. These physical ordeals became the source of a unique physical language which she expresses through performance, journeying through purposeful pain as an altered state of consciousness invoking vision.