How Do I Make Myself a Body?

How Do I Make Myself a Body? is a publication centred on the work of Henrik Olesen and the eponymous project that explores concepts of embodiment,

identity, and self-construction. The title itself—How Do I Make Myself a Body?—poses a fundamental question about how bodily presence and subjectivity are formed, perceived, and represented in cultural and artistic contexts. The book documents works that address the body not as a given or stable fact, but as a field of negotiation shaped by language, action, relation, and power. Olesen’s practice frequently engages with performance, text, and installation to make visible the ways in which bodies are inscribed with meaning and how social codes, history, and personal experience participate in that inscription. The publication situates this inquiry within a broader dialogue about corporeality, queer theory, and the politics of representation, presenting the body as both a conceptual construct and a site of lived experience. Rather than functioning as a traditional catalogue of images alone, How Do I Make Myself a Body? combines artworks, texts, and project documentation to underline the artist’s sustained investigation into how bodies are made, remade, and understood through cultural frameworks.