The human body plays an important role in exploring gender, understanding aspects of identity, conforming or contradicting social conventions, and expressing one's thoughts to others. In art, the body is an instrument of appeal to individuality, freedom, power. Many artists use their bodies in the creative process, as a means of exploring social issues and ideas, developing new concepts in art, and as a way of responding to political situations. Often the theme of war, immigration, disability, gender roles and identities, personal boundaries is revealed.

With the advent of feminist movements, artists began to question the norms set for the representation of femininity and the female body. Feminist artists have shown the female body through a variety of optics, seeking to transform stereotypes about standards of provision, creating a space for discussion about women's liberation in the art world and beyond. The main focus was the question of containment and borders.

With the development of the artistic style - performance, the use of the body by artists has become a way of declaring control over one's own body, as well as thinking about masochism, endurance to pain, humiliation, torture. As a rule, the performances were documented by photography or video.

In today's world, when it comes to war and violations of human rights, the body has taken on the character of an acute reaction and suffering. Artists react to state control, to the problems of fertility, gender, religion.

Two collections "Bi-textuality and cinema" (2003) and "Gender and transgression in the visual arts" (2007) by Almira Usmanova, designed to present the problems of the body and sexuality in the visual arts, became an important work for Belarusian culture and science. The first collection analyzes films about the subcultures of gays, lesbians, transvestites and any form of "other" sexuality. In the second collection, discussions are conducted on the topic of overcoming the boundaries of legitimate sexuality and corporality through art.

In the works of Belarusian artists A.R.Ch., Irina Anufriyeva, Ruslan Vashkevich, Zhanna Gladko, Olga Kirilova, Aleksey Kuzmich, Vasilisa Polyanina, Lyudmila Rusova, Antonina Slobodchikova and many others, corporality actively appears as an artistic image and means. There are reflections on strength and weakness, fear, memory, identity and gender.