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Symbionts is an exhibition that's
about exploring our relationship to the other species
that we live with.
So really put simply, symbiosis means "with living."
And part of the motivation for this exhibition
is for us to reexamine the existing relationships
that we have of living alongside many other species.
So this exhibition really began, both on an art historical
and critical level, to talk about a new generation
of bioartists-- they may not even call themselves that--
who are way beyond the code, who are looking at epigenetics.
In other words, how does life express itself
in complete entanglement with other life?
Many of them are thinking about these kind of entanglements
between human influence, biological processes,
and social and economic systems and histories.
In this opening gallery, what Pentecost and Williams and Lynn
all force us to acknowledge is that there's no separation
in the biosphere, right?
Anything we do economically has ramifications ecologically.
And that is a profound lesson of Symbionts, the exhibition.
In some ways, the artwork is rendering
these kind of biopolitical processes, the ways in which
these substances, these biological substances,
have been taken up by biopolitical systems
to other bodies, based on their race and their gender
presentation, rendering them inert and kind
of turning them into another kind of object
of visual pleasures.
And similarly, Kiyan Williams and Nour Mobarak,
who are both working with mycelium,
different forms of mycelium and the fruiting bodies of fungus
called mushrooms.
Working with fungi became something
I wanted to do because the fungi always
seems to give its own proposition to any idea
that I might have.
The mycelium ended up being a great material,
not only for its philosophical or ontological propositions,
but also it's a really fantastic sculptural material.
It takes on any mold I put it in.
It is very lightweight.
It's very durable.
I find it very beautiful.
For the past 30-plus years, I've been making work
where I look at land and I look at the sort of history of land
from a native perspective, from an Indigenous perspective.
And I think the exhibit is trying to say something
about a symbiosis, the relationship
between different species.
And so I'm reflecting the philosophy and the practices
of the Haudenosanee people and some other Indigenous
peoples who are in kinship relationships with nonhuman
life.
The main source of energy for this installation is residual
water that we get from the city of Boston
OK?
From different parts of the city.
So each one of the microbial cell towers
has a container where we have these water samples
from different parts.
And you can see how much energy is being
produced in each of the cells and know
how polluted water is in one zone or another,
in the sewage.
So, this piece here is like a representation of
a city looking for collaboration between species.
Where in this collaboration there can be a whole
treatment or a different relationship with the water.
So we located Pierre's work together
with Pamela Rosenkranz's work.
And that has some very interesting commentary
in and of itself.
And just in general, they both provoke thoughts in us
about the domestic, right?
The house, somewhat like the white cube,
is made to keep certain creatures in
and certain creatures out.
And both Huyghe and Rosenkranz are
talking about our entanglement in the domestics sphere,
Rosenkranz with domesticated felines, cats of all kinds,
and Huyghe with the unintentionally domesticated
spiders that live with us.
I think this exhibition offers a lot
of entry points for visitors of various backgrounds
and interests.
It's not a strict BioArt show.
There are works of drawing.
There's works of video.
There's sculpture.
And then there are a lot of works
that do engage living species and material,
whether it's the lion's mane fungus that's
growing as part of Candice Lin's work, or the spirogyra
algae within Anicka Yi's work, or the bacteria that
are active in filtering the wastewater that composes part
of Gilberto Esparza's piece.
So there's a lot of activity.
There are works that are changing form
over the course of the exhibition.
And there are a lot of interesting stories
that are told through these artworks.
I hope people come away from this exhibition
to recognize that symbiosis and our intradependency
with other organisms is actually the way the planet is
organized.
We evolved on this planet.
We didn't come from a capsule launched by Amazon, right?
We evolved on this planet.
And we are utterly dependent on all of these creatures
that we're entangled with.
We're not individuals.
We don't get to extract endlessly
outside of a metabolic system that we're part of.
We are entangled.
And I hope people will take that as a utopian call
for changing our culture.
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