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Several contemporary artists represent or stage bodies which have been blatantly marked by History and by their own history. This marking may be determined by their social embedding (in terms of the social class to which they belong, their ethnic or gender origin), or may be a question of the confrontations and ordeals imposed upon them by the societies within which they act. Contrary to the predominant, normative exhibition of bodily purity, contemporary art presents bodies which are impure, ambiguous, or disquieting. Faced with the various powers (political, economic, ideological, moral, religious, scientific, technological) which, as in the past, seek to subject the body, art avails of its capacity to conjure up certain images in which, whether as an absence or as a presence, the body of rebellion reverberates.