Biotech Art – Revisited

**Exhibition * Symposium * Workshop**

9 April – 2 May 2009

In his final exhibition project as director of the EAF Melentie Pandilovski revisits a signature theme – art and biotechnology. Biotech Art – Revisited includes an exhibition (of the same name), a workshop – Vital micro-ecologies: splice, dice, duplicate, and a free public symposium – Life, death & biotechnia. The project plans to tease out connections between art, culture, biotechnology & genomics, with leading Australian and international artists and theorists set to install & present their recent works.

EXHIBITION: Biotech Art - Revisited

CURATOR Melentie Pandilovski

ARTISTS/SCIENTISTS Trish Adams, Bio-Kino (Guy Ben-Ary & Tanja Visosevic), BioHome (Catherine Fargher & Terumi Narushima), André Brodyk, Gary Cass & Donna Franklin, FOaM (Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney), Niki Sperou, Paul Thomas in collaboration with Kevin Raxworthy, Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr)

The works in the exhibition will present an array of approaches – from the humorous and playful to the deadly serious – from the way we think about the ‘origins’ of life, the scale and dimensions of living matter, to relationships with nourishment, death, fashion and appearance. Australia’s leading international artists in the field – Tissue Culture & Art Project – will exhibit mark II of their award winning NoArk, a bioreactor that houses a ‘chimerical blob’ or a ‘sub-life neo-organism’. What to call these semi-living cells is called to question,– how to think about them at all? BioHome will exhibit/perform The Chromosome Knitting Project, an event that blurs the distinction between home and laboratory, between expert and novice. Guy Ben-Ary & Tanya Visosevic have invented what they call the ‘bio-cinematic’ which presents ‘Bio-Art as a Freak Show’ with The Living Screen, whilst Donna Franklin & Gary Cass will display living cloth/skin in Micro ‘be’ Fermented Fashion. Nanoessense is a foray into nanotechnology by Paul Thomas and Kevin Raxworthy, whilst André Brodyk works with representation at a minuscule scale by developing his own strain of bacteria in the installation Proto-animate19. Niki Sperou is enamoured of the aesthetic and cultural poetics of vegetal micro bacterial chimera in Man a Plant; whilst still in the vegetal world but at a human-scale FOaM takes a political stance in their multi-nodal groWorld, initiating actions using the forces of design, permaculture and technology. FOaM’s mantra is: ‘For more serendipity and cross-fertilisation – minimise borders and maximise edges!

SYMPOSIUM: Life, death & biotechnia

Wednesday 8th April. 10am – 5pm
Venue: Mercury Cinema. Admission is free

CONVENORS Melentie Pandilovski & Linda Cooper
SPEAKERS Marcello Costa FAA, Professor of Neurophysiology, Flinders University; Linda Cooper, Director of the Bragg Initiative in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet South Aust; Niki Sperou, Dr Catherine Fargher & Terumi Narushima, Oron Catts, Dr Paul Thomas, Tania Visosevic, Vicki Sowry, André Brodyk, Dr Trish Adams

Life, death & biotechnia is a one-day symposium that brings together the artists & scientists participating in the Biotech Art – Revisited project, along with others involved in the discourses surrounding art/science collaborations. The speakers will present their most recent questions, understandings and misreadings relating to ethical relationships to partial life, the endless limitations and opportunities for artists and scientists to (mis)understand the others disciplines, challenges for all kinds of taxonomies, the methods and manners of the ubiquitous ‘infiltration’ of biotechnicity into everyday life.

Bookings can be made by emailing info@eaf.asn.au Include your name and those of any others attending with you.
More detail at http://www.eaf.asn.au/2009/biotech09-workshop.html

WORKSHOP: Slice, dice, duplicate

Tuesday 14 – Friday 17 April
Applications close 12 March 5pm COB

CONVENOR Niki Sperou

As a part of the Biotech Art – Revisited project the Experimental Art Foundation has organized a workshop titled Vital micro-ecologies: splice, dice, duplicate. The workshop – led by the South Australian biotech artist Niki Sperou and hosted by the Department of Medical Biotechnology at Flinders University – will serve as a theoretical and practical introduction to the creation of biotech art. Participation in the workshop is free. Applications are now invited from artists, curators, writers & others interested in participating. In an email addressed to info@eaf.asn.au with the subject line Biotech Art Workshop, tell us in no more than 200 words why you want to attend the workshop, what you hope to get from it etc. Attach a 1 page CV.
More detail at http://www.eaf.asn.au/2009/biotech09-workshop.html