SymbioticA

Still, Living

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The seminal exhibition Still, Living presented a showcase of art that deals with biological systems.

Curated by Jens Hauser and produced by SymbioticA, it featured the international debut of work developed at SymbioticA by renowned artists such as Orlan, Critical Art Ensemble and The Tissue Culture & Art Project as well as other major international artists in this field.

Projects range from a two-headed worm searching for the right direction; live birds learning new feeding technology; frogs that mutate naturally; the non/sense and nuances of DNA fingerprinting; the fallouts of bio-warfare and torture; a multi-ethnic skin coat of many colours, architecture that is literally growing, a bleeding angel and notions of life in the 21st century.

Jens Hauser said: “Let's step back a moment, this welcome moment of stillness in the eye of the breaking storm above an increasingly media-hyped art field.

"As biology's ascent to the status of hottest physical science has been accompanied by the massive use of biological metaphors in the humanities, this has also generated a wide range of biotech procedures that are providing artists simultaneously with the topics and new expressive media: transgenics, cell and tissue culture, plant and animal selection and breeding, homografts, synthesis of artificial DNA sequences, neurophysiology, synthetic biology, visualization techniques borrowed from molecular biology and biomedical research. Artists are in the labs.”

BEAP was the first experimental art festival worldwide to regularly include wet biological art practices.

Stillness as Bio artists presented in BEAP2007 were:

  • Art Oriente objet – France
  • Chandrasekaran and Gary Cass – Singapore/Australia
  • Tissue Culture and Art Project – Australia
  • Verena Kaminiarz – Germany/Canada
  • Paul Vanouse – USA
  • Critical Art Ensemble – USA
  • Natalie Jeremijenko – Australia/USA
  • Zbigniew Oksiuta – Poland/Germany
  • ORLAN   – France
  • Beatriz da Costa –Germany/USA
  • Brandon Ballengee – USA
Still, Living was held atThe Bakery ARTRAGE Complex from 15-23 September 2007