UJ presents SYM | BIO | ART exhibition an intersection of art and science

This is which will take place from 20 July to 17 August 2023 at the FADA Gallery, UJ is the first time that such an exhibition takes place on the African continent.

By CityLife Arts Writer

Biotechnology and contemporary art intersect in a new exhibition at the University of Johannesburg

The University of Johannesburg (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 the SYM | BIO | ART exhibition from 20 July to 17 August 2023 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 (biotechnological art) is an art practice where artists and scientists work with live tissues, microbes, living organisms and life processes as raw material to create artwork.

This ground breaking exhibition includes works by nine of 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.

 Through their artistic productions, the team use interdisciplinary approaches of working with existing biomaterials and producing new ones to arrive at practical research findings.

The 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 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 one and the same.

The co-founders of the CMRC, Professors Leora Farber (Director of the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) Research Centre, in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, and Tobias Barnard, Director of the Water and Health Research Centre (WHRC) in the Faculty of Health Sciences at UJ explain that:

“From its beginnings in the early 1990s, bio-art has 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 a 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, under-developed 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 on 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?

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication that will be available after the run of the show, as well as a physical, online and hybrid public programme featuring a range of conversations, panel discussions, presentations, exhibition walkabouts and creative interventions. Here, participants can hear directly from, and engage with the artists, as well as scientists, lawyers, engineers, and experts across a diverse range of fields in the Humanities, as well as those working in the fields of Visual Art and Design.

.The exhibition is produced by members of the CMRC, VIAD, and the WHRC.

SYM | BIO | ART opens on July 20, at 18:30 for 19:00. The exhibition runs until 17 August. It takes place at the FADA GALLERY, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture building, University of Johannesburg, 17 Bunting Road, Auckland Park, Johannesburg.