Viscous Bodies Sarah
Hermanutz
Alanna Lynch Opening:
Friday, 23 March, 2018 / 8pm
24 March - 13 May, 2018
Fri - Sun, 2-6 pm and by appointment (closed Easter Weekend 30 March-1
April) Artist
Talk with both artists: 25 March 2018 / 3pmThe
project follows an open framework in showing the ongoing artistic
research of two emerging artists in the field of art & science.
Taking all things fluid as a starting point, the work of Sarah Hermanutz
and Alanna Lynch covers themes such as amphibians, bodily borders,
boundaries, marginalisation, materialism, seepage, sensory and wetlands
through performance, installations, multimedia and living artworks.
In addition to object and action, this project also invites the
public to become engaged with the matter in manifold ways.
Exhibition view Viscous Bodies, Sarah Hermanutz & Alanna Lynch
Live Decomposition,2017-18, Sarah Hermanutz, Nenad Popov
Fermenting Feelings, 2018, Alanna Lynch
Potentials, 2015-16, Alanna Lynch
Right: Inside Bodies, 2016, Sarah Hermanutz, Paula Montecinos and Nayeli Vega, center: Gut feeling, 2016-18, Alanna Lynch, Left: Salamander Mourning Veil, 2008/9 Sarah Hermanutz
Salamander Mourning Veil, 2008/09, Sarah Hermanutz
Alanna Lynch & Sarah Hermanutz
Left: Concealed and Contained, 2009-18, Alanna Lynch, right: Inside Bodies, 2016, Sarah Hermanutz, Paula Montecinos and Nayeli Vega
Nervous in Flux, 2018 Sarah Hermanutz & Alanna Lynch, installation
Viscous Bodies, Vernissage, 23 March, 2018
Viscous Bodies, Vernissage, 23 March, 2018
Viscous Bodies, Vernissage, 23 March, 2018
Viscous Bodies, Vernissage, 23 March, 2018
Viscous Bodies, Vernissage, 23 March, 2018
Viscous Bodies, Vernissage, 23 March, 2018
Alanna
Lynch works with living organisms, biological materials and
performance, examining the politics of affect and questions of agency.
She explores the aesthetics of disgust and fear, with a focus on
embodied knowledge and non-conscious forces. In her project Potentials
Lynch cultivated colonies of fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster,
through their whole lifecycle, making use of microscopic photography
and performative display, confronting the visitor with containers
of flies in a research-like setting. This evoked reactions ranging
from curiosity to disgust. Her performances often explore bodies
and identity as something complex and indefinable; both made up
of ever more dividable parts of matter. For the performance Concealed
and Contained she collected her own hair over many years and
crocheted it into an ever-growing container which now covers her
head and shoulders. In performance she stands naked, except for
the self-made form of concealment which she then works upon: crocheting
a continual work-in-progress.
Sarah
Hermanutz researches the intersections of performance, technology,
and ecology. Her sculptures, installations and performances are
preoccupied with wetlands, amphibious creatures, gender and social
cognition. Live Decomposition, an ongoing collaboration with
sound artist Nenad Popov, was performed last year in Lisbon and
Berlin. Video documents Hermanutz's hands as they work through an
aquarium filled with mud, sand, living and dead wetland organisms,
and other collected material. The artist has a keen interest in
amphibians - both as organism and as metaphor. In Inside Bodies
an axolotl in a jar becomes a point for human/nonhuman contact.
Her work Salamander Mourning Veil, which includes drawings,
photographs and performance, is an artist statement on both the
mass extinction of amphibians and the degradation of wetlands, a
melancholy act of caring and empathy in the spirit of Haraway's
'staying with the trouble'.
The
exhibition project examines the aesthetics of viscosity. The two
artists will also collaborate on an installation, which will form
an interconnecting system of liquids, living materials, organisms
and technology and encompass the common themes of their work.
Human as Nonhuman. Microbiome and holobiome
#human microbiome #holobiont #redefining ourselves
Moderator: Marta de Menezes
Tarsh Bates (Artist, SymbioticA, The University of Western Australia, Perth)
On Being a Microbioartist: Making art in a microbiology laboratory
I explore the physical, emotional and political relationships between
humans and Candida albicans(an opportunistic fungal pathogen of humans).
These relationships span immunology and ecology, sexuality (both human
and microbial) and evolutionary biology, public health and body
discipline, institutional frameworks and kinship. I examine the
biopolitical implications of the recent revolution in our understanding
of the human body as being at least half non-human. In addition to the
challenges of working with pathogens, the rapid simplification of
genetic engineering technologies and increasing commodification of human
microbes raises complex questions about whether these organisms have
ethical standing: are they living or merely machines? This presentation
asks the audience to consider the perspective of the microbe, of the
pathogen, as a creature that is more-than-human, through a series of
artworks developed in a microbiological laboratory.
François-Joseph Lapointe (Artist and microbiologist, Department
of Biological Sciences, University of Montreal) Performative Microbiome Experiments
We inhabit the microbial world. Microbes live on us, around us, and
inside of us. Every single orifice of our bodies is populated by
millions of microbes. We eat microbes, digest microbes, and defecate
microbes. Whereas the human genome defines what we are as a species, the
human microbiome now redefines the concept of self. As a scientist, I
study the microbiome to detect novel types of interactions among
bacterial communities. As a performance artist, I use my body as a
canvas, tracking the evolution of my microbiome self. What if I become
vegetarian? What if I travel to a different country? What if I practice
celibacy for a month? Those are the kinds of artistic endeavours that
can be directly translated into scientific data. In this talk, I will
present my latest experimental performances with the microbiome as a way
of questioning the aesthetics of the self.
Regine Rapp (Art Theory, Curatorial Research, Art Laboratory Berlin) Nonhuman Subjectivities. Artistic Strategies towards a Multispecies Performativity There are different moments in current artistic processes that leave behind the humanist idea of the solo artistic genius and explore complex collaborations across disciplines and more provocatively across species and kingdoms. What does it mean when nonhuman agents perform in a 21st century artwork? While not proposing the nonhuman as artist, certainly the performative process of art production can be a vehicle for the nonhuman agent as well as multispecies entanglements. A short overview of the dynamic aesthetic field of making-kin shows various artistic methods, embracing the matter as such, a direct material engagement with the world (Barad). A new artistic paradigm proves to have overcome the nature/culture divide by implementing worldly terrains for multispecies encounter, intra-action and performativity in a postanthropocentric era.
Microbial Agency. Proposing Micro-Subjectivity#bacteria #quorum sensing #microbiology and philosophy
Moderator: Pablo Rojas
Ingeborg Reichle (Media Studies, University of Applied Arts
Vienna) Biome and Biomatter
Artists have
responded to non-human agency in the age of cutting age research in
multi-directional ways. In my contribution I want to critically
analyse a current artistic position referring to biomes as distinct
biological communities and particularly to human microbiomes, which
can be regarded as a the collection of bacteria, viruses, and other
microorganisms that are present on a human body. My presentation will
focus the art project FIFTY PERCENT HUMAN by the Austrian artist
Sonja Bäumel (Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam), which is in search
for a critical language, which is carefully balancing our imagination
about human-microbe interaction and the great diversity of the human
body’s ecosystem, mainly by using artistic, fictional and
philosophical research tools.
Regine Hengge (Institute of Biology, Dep. of Microbiology, Humboldt
University Berlin) Biofilms - invisible cities of microbes from the Petri dish to
the human body
Although bacteria are invisibly tiny single-cellular creatures, they represent the largest biomass on earth and manage to colonize nearly any site, including the human body. As the human microbiota, they contribute to keeping us healthy and happy. Based on our intimate relationship with them, we have learned to use them for food production and in biotechnology. On the other hand, some bacteria are nasty pathogens that cause infections that remained deadly to us before we discovered antibiotics, i.e. chemical weapons that bacteria themselves use against each other in their fight for food. While we have always envisioned bacteria swimming around as single cells, recent research has shown that they prefer to live in large communies termed 'biofilms'. The bacterial inhabitants of these 'cities of microbes' communicate and cooperate to produce an extracellular matrix of bio-polymers. This matrix not only confers protection, but allows bacterial biofilms to behave like tissues, i.e. to fold and buckle up into striking morphological patterns that even become visible to the naked human eye. By performing rapid morphogenetic movements based on an intricate inner structure, these biofilms are a prime example of 'active matter'.
Anna Dumitriu (Artist, Brighton) Make Do and Mend
Anna Dumitriu will discuss her project “Make Do and Mend" which
references the 75th anniversary of the first use of penicillin in a
human patient in 1941 and takes the form of an altered wartime women's
suit marked with the British Board of Trade's utility logo CC41, which
stands for 'Controlled Commodity 1941'. The holes and stains in the suit
have been patched with silk stained with pink colonies of E. coli
bacteria, grown on dye-containing agar. The genomes of these bacteria
have been edited using a technique called CRISPR, to remove an
ampicillin antibiotic resistance gene and scarlessly patch the break
using homologous recombination with a fragment of DNA en-coding the WWII
slogan "Make Do and Mend". Ampicillin is part of the penicillin group
of antibiotics so with this artistic genomic edit, Dumitriu and Goldberg
have used today's technology to return the organism to its
pre-antibiotic era state, reflecting on how we might in future control
and protect such biotechnological advances.
Monika Bakke (Institute of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan) The Force of Radical Openness: Multispecies Alliances Beyond the Biological
"When the biological opens onto the mineral, and the planetary onto the cosmic, there arises a need not only to recalibrate the scales used to measure space and time, but also to focus on the forces that precede forms. One such force is metabolism, which operates as functions, cycles, and systems that enable the flux and transformation of matter. It infinitely generates novel forms of organization within and with the environment. Acknowledging that multispecies alliances are formed among both organic and nonorganic species by the forces of biological and mineral evolutions requires us to reconsider the questions of belonging and identity. The living/nonliving divide then appears to be no more than a convenience and a convention, because matter, both on earth and elsewhere, is self-assembling and evolving."
Dr. Monika Bakke is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at
the Adam Mickiewicz University,Poznań, Poland. She writes on
contemporary art and aesthetics with a particular interest in
posthumanist, transspecies and gender perspectives. She is the author of
Bio-transfigurations: Art and Aesthetics of Posthumanism (2010, in
Polish) and Open Body (2000, in Polish) co-author of Pleroma: Art in
Search of Fullness (1998), and editor of Australian Aboriginal
Aesthetics (2004, in Polish), Going Aerial: Air, Art, Architecture
(2006) and The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating (2011). From 2001 till
2017 she was working as an editor of a Polish cultural journal Czas
Kultury (Time of Culture). More information at http://www.artlaboratory-berlin.org/html/eng-event-40.htm
Špela Petrič (Scientist & artist, Amsterdam/ Ljubljana) The Vegetal, Intimately
Petrič's artistic research looks at vegetal life as the unchallenged frontier
of estrangement, revealing the limits of human empathy as well as its
anthropocentric underpinnings. Plants are, in their omnipresence,
utterly foreign complexity and lack of identification elements allowing
anthropomorphism, ideal subjects of study in an attempt to re-examine
relations with the Other. The field of plant neurobiology has tried to
uncover mechanisms of plant function by likening the physiology of
plants to animal systems in order to raise awareness of the intricate,
highly adapted life of plants; however, the plants’ cryptic
chemically-based conversations, their biological inter-species networks,
their centennial lifespans and non-centralized operation make them the
benevolent aliens living among us. How can one draw together the world
of human beings and that of plants, while resisting the temptation to
sacrifice the specificity of either perspective and respecting the
foreignness of vegetal life? The contribution lays out three
performative projects –'Skotopoiesis', 'Phytoteratology' and 'Strange
Encounters' – through which the artist explores radical and novel modes of
human-plant intercognition, which, while discovering the vegetal,
delineate our own borders to be overcome.
Joana Bergmann (Institute of Biology, Free University Berlin) Hand in Hand. Root Morphological Traits and Their Mediation by
Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi
The environmental pressures that shape the evolution of a species root morphology are numerous. Roots have to take up nutrients and water by simultaneously blocking root feeding and colonizing soil biota. Depending on the ecological niche of a species, roots differ in their execution of this balancing act. Ecologists try to quantify these different strategies by measuring root morphological traits. The majority of land plants form mycorrhizal symbioses with soil fungi. Those plant-fungal interactions are mutualistic -meaning that both partners profit from the symbiosis. With their fine hyphal networks the fungi take up nutrients and water from the soil and transport it to the plant roots in exchange for carbon, which the plant photosynthesizes. Additionally, they can protect the roots from pathogens. The plants fitness and the morphology of roots therefore varies in response to mycorrhizal colonization while the mycorrhizal fungi themselves are nonviable without a living root. Literature for Joana Bergmann's talk:
Bergmann, J., Ryo, M., Prati, D., Hempel, S. and Rillig, M. C. 2017. Root traits are more than analogues of leaf traits: the case for diaspore mass. New Phytologist 216: 1130–1139. doi:10.1111/nph.14748.
Camenzind T, Rillig MC. 2013. Extraradical arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal hyphae in an organic tropical montane forest soil. Soil Biology and Biochemistry 64: 96–102.
Ellenberg H, Leuschner C. 2010. Vegetation Mitteleuropas mit den Alpen. Stuttgart, GER: Ulmer.
Heijden MGA Van Der, Martin FM, Selosse M-A, Sanders IR. 2015. Mycorrhizal ecology and evolution : the past , the present , and the future. New Phytologist 205: 1406–1423.
Hempel S, Götzenberger L, Kühn I, Michalski SG, Rillig MC, Zobel M, Moora M. 2013. Mycorrhizas in the Central European flora: relationships with plant life history traits and ecology. Ecology 94: 1389–1399.
Kattge J, Díaz S, Lavorel S, Prentice IC, Leadley P, Bönisch G, Garnier E, Westoby M, Reich PB, Wright IJ, et al. 2011. TRY - a global database of plant traits. Global Change Biology 17: 2905–2935.
Kutschera L., Lichtenegger E. 1992. Wurzelatlas mitteleuropäischer Grünlandpflanzen. Band 1 & 2. Stuttgart; Jena; New York : Gustav Fischer Verlag.
Kleyer M, Bekker RM, Knevel IC, Bakker JP, Thompson K, Sonnenschein M, Poschlod P, van Groenendael JM, Klimeš L, Klimešová J, et al. 2008. The LEDA Traitbase: a database of life-history traits of the Northwest European flora. Journal of Ecology 96: 1266–1274.
Smith SE, Read DJ. 2008. Mycorrhizal Symbiosis. London: Academic Press.
Violle C, Navas M-L, Vile D, Kazakou E, Fortunel C, Hummel I, Garnier E. 2007. Let the concept of trait be functional! Oikos 116: 882–892.
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