Gallery Spaces Panel VI: Paradoxes and obstacles in maintaining and staging alive biomedia art
This panel with prominent protagonists involved in the field of biomedia art discusses the unprecedented challenges to stage, transport, conserve and collect art that appropriates and subverts the most diverse technologies of the life sciences. The shift from organic representation or simulation to actual biological manipulation results in technical, institutional, regulatory, legal, ethical, bureaucratic, philosophical and aesthetical issues with regards to museum infrastructures, the status of living organisms, tissues and GMOs, and their fragility when maintaining, conserving, re-enacting or shipping them. Such works at the threshold of microperformativity and necropolitics face undesired bacterial deterioration and contamination, and cultural institutions and collectors are still ill-equipped to deal with the subsequent issues.
