Exiled From Our Bodies How to Come Back to Our Senses

Foreword  Introduction: Homecoming  1. Permeability of being  2. Weaving the senses  3. The porous screen  4. Exiled from our bodies  5. Inside the mirror  6. On artists’ knowing  7. Entering liminal spaces: Three case studies from my own practice  8. Radical hope: Reclaiming agency, defending ambiguity and nourishing multiplicity  Appendices  Bibliography  Index. 

Biography

Tereza Stehlíková is a Czech/British artist, researcher and educator working across moving image, installation and performance. Her artistic research explores sensory perception and embodiment. She leads the Visual Arts department at Vysoká škola kreativní komunikace and PhD seminars at the Academy of Performing Arts and the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, in Prague. She is also the founder and editor of Tangible Territory, an online journal on art and the senses.

“Effortlessly synthesizing the most interesting research currently underway in the study of sensory perception, while exploring the blunting influence of various technologies, Stehlíková uses her own life and artistic practice as a throughline connecting a splendid panoply of embodied insights.  An intersensory and interdisciplinary feast, the book will likely induce a fine derangement of the reader’s senses”. 

- David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology 

“This book represents a fascinating account of the artist’s sensuous journey. It is intriguing to see how the author incorporates concepts such as embodied cognition, sensory dominance, synaesthesia and so on as part of her own very personal journey as a film-maker. There is plenty of food for thought, quite literally in her discussion of the Icelandic Journey experiential multisensory dining event, for the interdisciplinary sensory scientist to come away enriched by”.

– Charles Spence, University of Oxford

“Exiled from our Bodies is a strongly and clearly argued reminder that the arts continue to be grounded in our deep sense of being and the activation and interplay of all our senses. All arts express and mediate our relations with the world and the critical views of this writer apply in the entire realm of the arts. The argumentation is rooted in the author’s personal convictions in the cultural and human values of art, wide reading of relevant literature and her personal exchange through years with thinkers, scholars and artists in the cultural and human meanings of art”.

- Juhani Pallasmaa, architect and former professor, Helsinki University of Technology

“Tereza Stehlíková’s Exiled from Our Bodies arrives at a moment when many of us feel the lingering aftershocks of enforced digital life that continue to mediate our sense of reality. In this book, the Czech–British artist and researcher asks what it might mean to resist such mediation, and to reclaim our existence in all its multi-sensory depth. At once memoir, philosophical reflection, and artistic inquiry, the book is both intimate and wide-ranging.” - Seisma

“Exiled from Our Bodies is a remarkable addition to the Sensory Studies series edited by David Howes. The book offers a deeply reflective exploration of how digital technologies and screen-based mediation estrange us from embodied, multi-sensory ways of knowing. Blending autoethnography, artistic research, and philosophical inquiry, Stehlíková invites readers to rediscover sensory presence as a foundation for creativity, ethics, and ecological awareness. Insightful and beautifully written, this work reaffirms the arts as vital tools for reawakening our capacity to feel, perceive, and inhabit the world attentively.” - International Sociological Association Newsletter