Gallery Artists

How can research into cometabolism between macro- and microorganisms help us understand the vital symbiosis between species across scales? How might this view of organisms as holobionts transform our understanding of life and health? How can we start shaping new ecologically informed cosmologies without falling into naturalistic tendencies?A healing space infused with soil-dwelling microbial cultures, imaginative journeys into the cellular landscapes of our bodies, a ceremonial gathering for cometabolising humans and microbes, alternative ways of mapping the holobiont: These are some of the ways in which we’ve tried to approach and artistically explore what a microbially focused metabolic gaze can afford in our understanding of and relationship with life.In our collaboration with research collective Renaissance Goo, Beauty Sensorium (2023), commissioned by the Wellcome Collection, visitors are engaged in historical and scientific research through tactile and multisensorial interactions. By encouraging heuristic learning about pasts, presents, and potential futures, we are keen to explore how new understandings and worldviews emerge. At the heart of the experiences we facilitate is a sensation of biophilia. Formulated by E.O. Wilson, the term describes our innate feelings of affiliation with and care for other species. In traditional ecological knowledge and belief systems, this connection has been consciously present and integrated with daily life and social practices for millennia. While avoiding falling into a naturalistic fallacy of over-romanticizing the idea of biophilia by reducing the complex and often destructive relationships that humans can have with other organisms, we aim to continuously explore, through cross-disciplinary dialogue, how new ecologically informed cosmologies can emerge and take form. As artists in search of open-ended, dynamic ways of learning, mapping, and living in symbiosis with the world, we find metabolism, with change at the root of the word and concept, a rich, diverse, and ever-morphing field of inspiration.More at https://baumleahy.com/Beauty-Sensorium.Host (2019) imagines a near-future scenario on the other side of documented microbiome diversity decline of those living industrialized lifestyles. The installation is a soft and tactile space consisting of glass, textiles, hemp fibers, and bioreceptive tiles, occasionally oozing a geosmin-scented microbial mist. Somewhere between a pharmacy, a bedroom, and a medicinal garden, the installation suggests how in the future microbial cultures might be consciously and aesthetically entangled with our built environments. Throughout this project, we were in dialogue with ecologist Rob Dunn and worked with architect Richard Beckett, who developed the textured, bioreceptive tiles. Within the installation, we hosted a “cellular ceremony,” a guided visual journey read out loud with an ambient soundscape that led to a series of performative works we call Cellumonials (2019–ongoing).Hege Tapio’s work stems from a fundamental interest in the intersection of art, science, and new technology—specifically art that makes direct use of or relates to the living and biotechnology. Her practice critically engages with contemporary issues surrounding the human condition, ecological sustainability, and the ethical implications of biotechnological advancements. Her projects may seek to utilize discomfort and pose critical perspectives by presenting factual playfulness mixed with brand identity, as in her project HUMANFUEL, where she challenges traditional boundaries, using her own body as both medium and subject. HUMANFUEL originated as a conceptual artwork through the website http://lipotechnica.com. The physical creation and installation of the art project took on physical form for Hybrid Matters, a Nordic tour dedicated to the confluence of art and science, where it was presented as an installation including biofuel made from the extracted adipose tissue of the artist. Originating from one of the wealthiest oil nations, HUMANFUEL serves as a provocative commentary on anthropocentrism, challenging viewers to rethink human identity in relation to broader ecological systems.In the subsequent art project HUMANOIL, a second extraction from the artists adipose tissue was rendered into oil. Drawing upon historic references of oil for medicinal use, as energy resource, and its significance in magic and religious rituals, the artist presents the oil as an extreme luxury product and as a tool for reinstalling new affirmations. Offered to participating audiences in a ritualistic performance, HUMANOIL is the artists proposal and initiative for engaging in new belief systems to achieve a sustainable mind shift and engagement. The trailer for this artwork can be seen at https://vimeo.com/990896333/689a2926f2. More at https://tapio.no/wp/humanfuel/.Azo dyes have been central to the food and pharmaceutical industry ever since they were first synthesized from coal tar during the Industrial Revolution. The metabolization of these dyes by gut microbes has been associated with a variety of health issues in humans. Tattoo ink often contains azo dyes. In addition, wastewater runoff from textile factories continues to contaminate and cloud waterways, especially in the global South.What kind of microbial landscape, nourished by “acceptable daily intakes” of azo dyes, is produced over time? How can the resulting shifts in the abundance of various microbial species be read as a message?I placed the four main azo dyes permitted for use in food in Canada into a bioreactor with a steady-state sample of my microbiome. I let it sit for ten days in this “proxy me,” and then examined the changes that took place in the microbial communities.It is highly probable that one of the upregulated species in my sample, Enterocloster_asparagiformis.lavalensis, possesses genes providing it with the ability to make azoreductase, which is an enzyme capable of metabolizing xenobiotics like azo dyes.The poem “Azo” explores the history of the four dyes. The poem “Reductase” is formally based on the activity of the azoreductase enzyme, which involves breaking the nitrogen double bond in the azo compound into two aromatic amines. Just as the action of the enzyme neutralizes the color of the dyes, “Reductase” repurposes the letters in Allura Red, Sunset Yellow, Tartrazine, and Brilliant Blue into other anagrammatic, spectral combinations to create two columns representing the separated amines. The microbe and its enzyme are nonhuman kin assisting human bodies in dealing with these artificial food additives. However, as is the case with any act of disassembly, the resulting pieces are not necessarily benign.This is a sound work for one person at a time. Listen with headphones. Link to the recording via QR code or at https://soundcloud.com/kira-o-reilly/arachnid-tick-sensing.Using a specially composed text and sound, alienlike sensational subjectivities of human/tick transspecies encounters are explored as inseparable from their environment-ing worlds and the ticks’ microbial cargos. Cross-kingdom relations are conducted via tick sensing of molecular, chemical phrases by which we betray our presence, through volatile secreted signatures.Arachnid—Tick Sensing was inspired by the uncanny sonic textures developed by Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF), who edited and mastered the TICK TALKs podcasts, her sound work I vs us, Kyla Schuller’s essay “The Microbial Self: Sensation and Sympoiesis,” and other readings.This work was made as part of TICK ACTs, SOLU, Helsinki June 2021. TICK ACTs presented contemplations and ideas from a collaboration between artists Laura Beloff and Kira O’Reilly on ticks, tick-borne pathogens, and their environments.TICK ACTs and TICK TALKs are part of Biofriction, a European collaboration project committed to supporting bioart and biohacking practices. Biofriction project is co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.Menopause Gym, outside, from Menopause Batteries and Endocrine Piracy: These images were made in 2021 during a Biofriction residency at Cultivamos Cultura and focused on aspects of strength and conditioning that invited challenges to the maintenance of balance, invited precarity and alterities to the perceived accomplishments of gym culture and menopause within the confining branding of “wellness” culture. Since around 2015, O’Reilly has been working with a loose and extended project titled Menopause Batteries and Endocrine Piracy. The artist explains: During the past few years I have been exploring my transition into perimenopause and then menopause within my artistic practice, creating private performance actions, writings, and readings that elaborate upon being environmentally menopausal. The positioning of menopause as environmental gestures toward current artistic practices that acknowledge and explore the motility of hormones and hormone-like molecules as exemplified in work by Mary Maggic and Spela Petric, as well as writings on toxicities and tranimalities emerging from transgender studies and environmental humanities such as the work of Eva Hayward. Environmentally menopausal acknowledges the agential movement of endocrine and endocrine-like molecules (endocrine disruptors) across and through all manner of bodies and artifacts (be they human animal, nonhuman animal, plant bodies, water systems, human-made materials, etc.) and their attendant consequences.Environmentally menopausal is also a terming that acknowledges the body (i.e., the discursive, material, semiotic) as being expanded, contingent, and provisional while also, in the lineage of feminist practice, as being deeply tethered to the specific and particular of the personal and lived immediacy of the intimacy of my body. Stating the provisional acknowledges the porosity, communicative nature, and embeddedness of bodies within material processes and systems of environment and as environmental systems—via endocrine-like motility, for example, how the microbiome is considered in Formosinho et al., “Environmentality in Biomedicine: Microbiome Research and the Perspectival Body.” In the realm of mainstream cultural commentary, menopause is enjoying a moment, an important one that dares to speak its name, discuss and parlez its vicissitudes but generally in terms that do little to change imposed traditional constructions of female corporal experience (i.e., symptomizing and medicalizing). The stoppage of menses and the complex cascades of physiological, psychic, and expressive effects and affects are little acknowledged or explored. My project of reframing menopause is a utopian vision and enactment, an extant, celebratory articulation that revels in re-cognizing the energetic potentialities of the marvelous shift. It holds an embracive and inclusive purview.As we witness the ways we are affected by consumed agriculturally farmed animals, ultra-processed foods, chemicals in our environment, microplastics, not to mention stresses in our lives … how do all these processed moments change our bodies, and particularly our gut microbiome? Where does the metabolism of these ingested materials lead us? Due to these stressors, our guts are losing the microbial biodiversity and complexity that they once had, creating a condition called dysbiosis. Gut diseases, such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, among others, are on the rise globally. How are we mutating? Can we evolve to become differently abled creatures? What models should we look to?Our stomachs are eerily close to the acidic stomachs of vultures. Vultures are incredible contributors to our environment, efficiently reducing pathogens, eliminating waste, and maintaining ecosystems. Do their guts hold a secret for our future? High is collaborating with Mani Arumugam, University of Copenhagen. The Arumugam Laboratory researches the human gut microbiome using the Simulator of the Human Intestinal Microbial Ecosystem (SHIME). Working with artificial gut environments, perhaps we can test how far we can push our gut systems.

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