Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art

The projects presented at the "Nervoplastica" exhibition were researched and developed at SymbioticA - Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts at The School of Anatomy, Physiology & Human Biology, The University of Western Australia.

Honorary Patronage of the President of Poland Bronisław Komorowski

Guy Ben-Ary during fifteen years of his practice have been combining the creative art with neurology. His projects, carried out in collaboration with scientists and other artists, balance between bioart and new media art. In his works, cultured neural networks play a role of the living component remaining in the interactive relationship with the technical, digital and robotic items. Exhibition Nervoplastica shows three examples of cultural works which use neuronal cultures - a kind of brain resulting from bioengineering treatments. In-Potentia, the work by Guy Ben-Ary and Kerstin Hudson, is a sculpture using cultured brain. In the installation The Living Screen, created together with Tanya Visocevic, living cells are integrated into the structure of the cinematographic camera, fulfilling the function of the screen there. In the installation Snowflake, realized together with Boryana Rossa, neural network composed of rat’s cells is stimulated with snowflake image in order to create the memory or dream of the snowflake. All three works are examples of hybrid relationship of art and science. They transfer neural forms grown in the laboratory to cultural sphere as art projects, inviting the audience to experience and reflect on new post-biological reality. Besides those two works, exhibition will also include submitted documentation of author’s other works, creative installation - MEART – Semi-living Artist and Silent Barrage, together with the drawings.

Guy Ben-Ary, is a Perth based artist and researcher. He is one of the core researchers of SymbioticA, an artistic laboratory dedicated to the research, learning and hands-on engagement with the life sciences, which is located within the University of Western Australia. Recognised internationally as a major artist and innovator working across science and media arts, Guy specialises in biotechnological artwork, which aims to enrich our understanding of what it means to be alive.

Guy’s work has been shown across the globe at prestigious venues and festivals from the Beijing National Art Museum to San Paulo Biennale to the Moscow Biennale. His work can also be seen in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2009, his work Silent Barrage was awarded an Honorary Mention in Prix Ars Electronica (Austria) and also won first prize at VIDA, a significant international competition for Art and Artificial Life.

Guy’s Main research areas are cybernetics, bio-robotics and the cultural articulation of Bio-technologies. His artworks usually utilize motion, growth and big data to investigate technological aspects of today’s culture and the re-use of biological materials and technologies.

Dr Kirsten Hudson is a practicing artist, writer and academic based in Western Australia, where she is employed as a lecturer in the Schools of Design and Art and Media Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University. Her research focuses on the philosophies and histories of the body, informed by gender studies, queer theory and French post-structuralism. This informs an art practice that critically resists and subverts normalising representations, constructions and perceptions of subjectivity, sociality and embodiment.

Her current research projects visually and textually explore: 1. the ethical and aesthetic consequences of stem cell technologies on understandings of life, death and personhood; 2, the potential of the art object to articulate ideas, feelings and experiences of melancholy, nostalgia, memory and mourning in a way that actively challenges the limits and understandings of loss and desire is a practicing artist, writer and academic based in Western Australia, where she is employed as a lecturer in the Schools of Design and Art and Media Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University. Her research focuses on the philosophies and histories of the body, informed by gender studies, queer theory and French post-structuralism. This informs an art practice that critically resists and subverts normalising representations, constructions and perceptions of subjectivity, sociality and embodiment. Her current research projects visually and textually explore: 1. the ethical and aesthetic consequences of stem cell technologies on understandings of life, death and personhood; 2, the potential of the art object to articulate ideas, feelings and experiences of melancholy, nostalgia, memory and mourning in a way that actively challenges the limits and understandings of loss and desire

Oleg Mavromatti (1965, Russia) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker, a prominent representative of the Moscow Actionism, a phenomenon of the radical performance art scene in 1990s Moscow. He has been a member of legendary Moscow performance art groups such as “Expropriation of the Territory of Art” and NECEZIUDIK. In 1995 Mavromatti establishes the independent film union SUPERNOVA, manifested as a fortress of Moscow radical cinema. Mavromatti has been legally prosecuted for his critical performance art and film work (such as the famous performance “Ne ver’ glazam” (“Do Not believe Your Eyes”), 2000, for what his art and film archive has been confiscated in 2000. Therefore many of his early works are completely lost or accessible only from VHS copies. Mavromatti left the country in 2000 and since then he lives in Bulgaria and New York.

In Bulgaria, Rossa and Mavromatti established art collective ULTRAFUTURO – an international group of artists engaged with issues of technology, science and their social implications. They have been included in the Biennial for Electronic Art, Perth (BEAP) and shown at Foundation for Art and Creative Technologies (FACT), Liverpool; Society for Art and Technology (SAT), Montreal etc.

Boryana Rossa (born 1972) is a Bulgarian interdisciplinary artist and curator making performance art, video and photographic work. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally including most notably at the National Gallery of Fine Arts in Sofia, Goethe Institute, the Moscow Biennial, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Exit Art, Biennial for Electronic Art in Perth, and Foundation for Art and Creative Technologies in Liverpool. She frequently collaborates with artist and filmmaker Oleg Mavromati often under the title ULTRAFUTURO - an international art collective started in 2004. Some of her awards and grants include the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art, the Essential Reading for Art Writers Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Sofia, and a New York Foundation for the ArtsFellowship in 2014 in Digital/Electronic Arts. She is an Assistant Professor of Transmedia at Syracuse University.

Tanja Visosevic is an interdisciplinary artist, screen critic/theorist and educator. Her art projects employ the technologies and strategies of the moving image, performance and bio-art to explore the cultural and philosophical terrains that consume her. Much of her obsessions deal with the Life and Death Instincts, Identity Politics and the pioneering possibilities, as well as side effects, spawned from New Technologies.

The formation of a revolutionary audiovisual culture via digital technologies is embodied by much of Visosevic’s creative undertakings, present in her interactive mobile phone performances (such as Oh Bon! Commissioned by Fremantle Arts Centre in 2008 for the Bon Scott Project), through to Bio-Kino’s The Living Screen project (researched and developed at SymbioticA – The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts). These works possess an evolved poetics that situates her art practice within a swelling circuit of new genres and moving-image experiences.

Visosevic is a lecturer for the School of Communications and Arts at Edith Cowan University, where she combines her research in new media platforms with educating students in understanding the nature and experience of the moving image.

Project „Art+Science Meeting 2015” is financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage

BIP

Municipal Institution of Culture