A new world of South African bio-art in Auckland Park
The exhibition is in collaboration with artists and scientists is the first BioArt exhibition in the country.
Biotechnology and contemporary art intersect in a new exhibition at the University of Johannesburg (UJ).
UJ is launching the Creative Microbiology Research Co-Lab (CMRC), an inter-faculty collaboration dedicated to producing creative work that lies at the intersection of microbiology, visual representation and artistic practice.
To mark its launch, the CMRC is presenting this exhibition from July 20 to August 17 at the Fada Gallery, UJ. This is the first exhibition of bio-art to be held in South Africa and on the African continent. Bio-art is described as an art practice where artists and scientists work with live tissues, microbes, living organisms and life processes as raw material to create artwork.
This groundbreaking exhibition includes works by nine artists and scientists including Professors Tobias Barnard, Leora Farber and Nathaniel Stern, dancer and choreographer Nelisiwe Xaba, research designer Nadine Botha, UJ artist-in-residence Brenton Maart, architectural inventor Xylan de Jager, architectural practitioner Miliswa Ndziba and para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis.
Featured artworks are made using, or referring to a diverse range of microbial and biological forms – including pathogenic bacteria, mycelia, viruses and living/non-living materials such as plant matter, all of which render the invisible visible. These works are said to point to how our bodies are an ecosystem, entangled with the living and non/living matter that is inside us and surrounds us, and that our microbial environment is simultaneously external and internal – in many ways, we are the same.
Co-founders of CMRC, Professors Leora Farber, and Tobias Barnard, said from its beginnings in the early 1990s, bio-art had grown from a niche area of interest to a rapidly emerging field of research. Contemporary bio-art is a hybrid form of collaborative, experimentally driven practice in which artists and scientists work together to explore the creative possibilities, and speculative futures, represented by the intersection of these two ‘cultures’. In contrast to the historical conception of art and science as being opposed, these collaborations encourage transdisciplinary creativity and are driven by mutual curiosity and recognition that, in some cases, an objective may only be achieved through unconventional methods.
Although it is becoming increasingly recognised internationally, bio-art is a relatively unknown, underdeveloped field in South Africa and on the African continent. The CMRC is founded on the conviction that bio-art holds enormous potential to generate new insights, perspectives and scholarly knowledge that arise from and pertain specifically to, an African context.
The artists featured in the exhibition take an ‘intra-active’ approach to making, which contributes to vital debates currently being put forward in the fields of bio-philosophy, bio-politics and bio-ethics regarding the relationships between humans and the environment.
The exhibition prompts its audience to ask pertinent questions such as: What constitutes life? Who controls life? What are the implications and consequences of manipulating life? How will these technologies affect interactions with the environment? How can we create with consideration and care? How may we think and practice with life? Can we imagine new practices and patterns of thinking? How might we live with contamination and its risks? And, finally, by bringing new methodologies and materials into artistic realms, how can artists play a role in critically and creatively shaping our current and future ecologies?
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