The Kind and Quality of the Whole (2004)
(6 minutes) 16mm color negative, Hand processed work prints, Sound: CD, digital files
Filmmaker: Josephine Sales
Grant Awarded to: Josephine Sales
Archive: Museum of Modern Art
‘The Kind and Quality of the Whole’ (2004) is a dual-channel experimental 16mm film, projected aside by side, that takes Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies as a conceptual departure to interrogate the entwined legacies of photography, cinema, taxonomy, biomedicine, and psychoanalysis. Across two adjacent strips—mirroring, splitting, and slipping out of sync—the film opens an alchemical space where bodies shimmer between presence and performance, between subject and object.
With equal parts inquiry and irreverence, the film draws from the history of scientific and medical imaging to ask: what happens when the body refuses to behave? Especially the disabled, racialized, and gendered body— so often marked as deviant, in need of fixing, or reduced to evidence.
Here, the act of looking is not neutral; it is a structuring gaze that extracts, disciplines, eroticizes, and corrects. Drawing from archival forms like motion studies and medical photography, the film explores how bodies have been framed as problems to be solved—measured, fixed, or brought into normative alignment.
The side-by-side projection reenacts and disturbs this impulse to sort and define. Each frame becomes both specimen and mirror, staging a doubling that evokes the uncanny: repetition that unsettles, familiarity that estranges. The body appears split—both self and Other—trapped in a recursive performance shaped by the camera’s gaze and the viewer’s will to know or possess.
Sound is fragmented and non-semantic: breath, electricity, and wail form an aural field that resists coherence, echoing the film’s refusal to resolve.
Hand-processed sequences introduce ghostly duplicates, chemical distortions, and degraded traces of the primary images, challenging the fantasy of purity or biological origin.
The Kind and Quality of the Whole is a study in unfixing—a disruption of cinematic order and a refusal of the visual regimes that have long turned bodies into evidence, deviation into spectacle, and care into correction.
Josephine Sales is an interdisciplinary artist working in time-based media, sculpture, photography, and performance. Sales’s work explores the politics of disability, labor, and visual representation through experimental uses of analog film, archival materials, sound, and temporal forms. Drawing on histories of medical imaging and cinematic apparatus, Sales creates works that foreground contingency, challenge normative systems of classification, and expose the violence embedded in processes of capture. Sales’s projects have been presented at institutions including the Palais de Tokyo, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and The Shed, with recent residencies at UC Irvine(US) and If I Can’t Dance… (NL)
