Science and Art have become closer than ever in a new exhibition VISCERAL, which opened in Dublin on Friday.
This is BioArt – combining art and biotechnology and sounds both amazing and a little disturbing.
The exhibition is curated by Oron Catts and Dr Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA (University of Western Australia) and features works by over 70 artists from around the world.
It is not for the faint-hearted and indeed not suitable for anyone under the age of 15. Many works are in fact live experiments involving setting biological material such as DNA, breast milk, tissue cultures, viruses and neurons to work for artistic reasons.
For example, Blood Wars by Kathy High, for example, white blood cells are taken from different individuals put together in a Petri dish where you can watch them do battle together.
And Alicia King’s The Vision Splendid, involves two glass bottles containing human tissue culture. They are linked by tubing, kept at body temperature and sat on black columns. At the bottom of these bottles, dark limbs emerge. At first they look like cloth but are infact made of human tissue, growing on a skeleton of biodegradable polymer. As the dissolves, only the fleshy limbs remain…..
So, if you enjoyed Damien Hirst’s cow in formaldehyde or the horror of the “Bodyworks” make your way to Dublin before February 25th and see these latest bio-art creations in the flesh….
