The National
Taken from a 2004 installation by Bohyun Yoon, a celebrated Korean artist and assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, the striking cover image on The National’s sixth album is a comment on how technology has led to a depersonalisation of the human body, through plastic surgery and cloning. “I expose socially constructed notions of race, class and gender by combining images of the human body with materials that possess invisible properties,” Yoon has said of his work. The black and white shot of a woman’s head, seemingly cut in two and disconnected from her body, is cropped from a larger photograph. Yoon positioned two models on a white platform and placed four plexiglass mirrors, cut to shape around their bodies, resulting in reflections of apparently detached limbs and heads. The band’s interest in bold, modern art didn’t stop there. During the month of Trouble Will Find Me’s release in 2013, the Brooklyn band collaborated with Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson at New York’s MoMA PS1, performing their song Sorrow on a live loop for six hours, later releasing the recording as a 9LP boxset.