Still, Living

Curated by Jens Hauser
Produced by SymbioticA
At The Bakery ARTRAGE Complex, 233 James Street, Northbridge
Opening 15 September 6pm
Runs until the 23 September
Open Daily from 12-6pm
http://www.stillliving.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/

The seminal exhibition Stillness as Bio presents a showcase of art that deals with biological systems. It features 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 biowarfare and torture; a multiethnic skin coat of many colours, architecture that is literally growing, a bleeding angel and notions of life in the 21st century.

“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” Jens Hauser, Curator

BEAP has been the first experimental art festival worldwide to regularly include wet biological art practices. Stillness as Bio artists presented in BEAP2007 are:

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

www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au
www.artrage.com.au
www.beap.org