Angewandte
Interdisciplinary LabOpening with live performances by Maja Smrekar and Klaus Spiess / Ulla Rauter / Emanuel
Gollob / Rotraud Kern and a welcome by curators and artists Judith Reichart, Lucie Strecker, Thomas Feuerstein, Jens Hauser
Presentation of bodies, environments, texts, media, machines and biological organisms condensed into pictorial
spaces
We humans are colonized by bacteria, fungi and viruses, just as we colonize homes,
cities and environments. We also serve as hosts to ideologies, media and technologies.
The
concept of the holobiont, introduced in 1991 by biologist Lynn Margulis, describes us humans as a total living being permeated
by the biosphere.
It explores the self-conception of individual life, links us symbiotically with other organisms
via our microbiome, disturbs the division into subject and object and offends our usual concept of ego. Understanding the
world as a holobiont reminds us: Life is other!
The social and psychological transformations of the
pandemic and the consequences of the climate and energy crises have brought to the forefront that life is first and foremost
that of agencies other than human. Simple demarcations no longer stand up to this dynamic.
‘We’ experience
‘us’ as transitory beings drifting between digital and molecular worlds and sense the twisting of boundaries within us as
the possibility of a new language beyond a symbolic distance from the world. With the exhibition Holobiont. Life is Other,
the Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab presents bodies, environments, texts, media, machines and biological organisms condensed
into pictorial spaces – each of which represents a narrative about another life and about the lives of others.
Curated by Judith Reichart, Lucie Strecker, Thomas Feuerstein, Jens Hauser
With contributions by Art
Orienté Objet, Irini Athanassakis, David Berry, Julia Borovaya, Adam Brown, Juan M. Castro & Akihiro Kubota, Tagny Duff,
Thomas Feuerstein, Karmen Franinovic, Ana Maria Gomez Lopez, Luis Hernan/Pei-Ying Lin/Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa, Hideo Iwasaki,
Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Eduardo Kac, Roman Kirschner, Lynn Margulis/Dorion Sagan/Bruce Clarke/David McConville, Yann Marussich,
Agnes Meyer-Brandis, ORLAN, Špela Petrič, Chris Salter, Maja Smrekar, Klaus Spiess/Ulla Rauter/Emanuel Gollob, Lucie Strecker/KT
Zakravsky, Tina Tarpgaard, Paul Vanouse, M R Vishnuprasad, Peter Weibel, and authors of the special issue On Micorperformativity,
Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 2020, 25 (3).
Scenography: Wolfgang Fiel, Institute for
cultural policy
The exhibition was curated originally for the Magazin 4 exhibition space in Bregenz.
The content was adapted and expanded for display at Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL)
20 Jan
2023, 19:00
Finissage with book presentation
