THE BODY

A truer reciprocity

Innovations in bio art at MIT 

By Leah Triplett Harrington

Talk around town preceded the opening of Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere on October 21, 2022, at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Though no one seemed to know exactly what the exhibition was about (or how to pronounce the title), everyone had opinions. 

 “It’s fungal,” someone told me. “Spiders will take over the smaller gallery,” said another. “It’s bio art,” my most confident informer explained, “and it will be an important show.” 

Such chatter was correct. Curated by eminent art historian Caroline A. Jones and List Center curators Natalie Bell and Selby Nimrod, the exhibition marked an evolution in how artists engage with living beings as primary materials. There were fungi (indeed, copious amounts) and daddy long-legs had their run of the List’s one-room project space gallery. Moreover, Symbionts introduced a truer reciprocity in bio art than when the term was first established in the early 2000s. Then, artists primarily used emerging digital technologies to artificially manipulate and modify organic material, meaning that the artist was still the individual author using biological matter as a material instead of a collaborator with the material. Bio art’s development at the beginning of this century paralleled that of dialogic, participatory-driven “social practice” artworks, in which talk relationships were central. Symbionts, which takes its title from the name of organisms that thrive through interdependent relationships, did not directly grapple with socially driven reciprocity, but it did emphasize exchange between beings as a primary material and aesthetic. 

Gallery attendants were eager to guide me through the exhibition's three galleries both times I visited. No touching, they insisted, even when it might seem like displays were meant to be handled. “So you know the drill,” the attendant who welcomed me for my second visit said, reminding me, again, not to touch anything. The attendants were also adamant that visitors start in the first gallery, in which I found Claire Pentecost’s soil-erg (2012), an installation of drawings and sculptures made from dirt transformed into currency. 

Pentecost is a member of the artist collective Critical Art Ensemble, which in the 1990s and 2000s, ushered in dialogic aesthetics, including approaches such as institutional critique. Often involving performance or conversation, institutional critique developed laterally to bio art, with artists like Pentecost using critique and organic materials alike. Institutional critique is palpable throughout the exhibition, which, as the curators write, “unveil[s] the critical interactions that give shape to our world and the interspecies entanglements that evolve it.” 

In soil-erg (which directly faced the exhibition’s curatorial text), two gold-leafed tables bookend wall-mounted drawings, each acting as pedestals of sorts for stacks of soil compressed into ingots; the drawings are imaginary paper currency, each depicting, according to the wall label, “nonhuman energy workers” as well as agricultural activists and ecologically-minded thinkers. Soil-erg, and Pentecost’s practice as a whole, anticipates the shift in bio art from a one-way exploitation of organic material into one that is more consciously aware of cooperation between humans and non-human life forms. 

Candice Lin’s Memory (Study #2, 2016), placed at a juncture between rooms, also involves organically-originated material with living forms, as well as participation. This small, almost humble, ceramic vase encases growing lion’s mane mushrooms, the coral-like caps of which balloon out of the vessel. Memory (Study #2) is easily the exhibition’s second-most talked about piece (after the spiders), as the mushrooms are nurtured by a mist of distilled urine volunteered by the exhibition’s staff. This “collective making” figures as a form of collaborative participation, one that could be read as a critique of the institution. Lin’s contextualization of lion’s mane mushrooms–which are sustained by dead organisms and waste–within memory-bearing vessels muses on the collective meaning-making that goes on in museums. “What, the work asks, might a fungus, collectively nourished from our waste, help us to remember?” the curators write. 

Anicka Yi’s Living and Dying in the Bacteriacene (2019) also takes up this question. A wall-mounted aquarium of sorts, it encases Spirogyra, freshwater algae that is usually a bane to aquarium keepers, as well as 3D-printed geometric shapes illuminated from the container’s top by a light that pulls the algae upward. Here, the algae “colonize” and overtake Yi’s forms, creating an abstract composition of velvety green and crisp white. The container’s size and scale are meant to reference painting. In the month between my two visits, the oxygen-producing algae indeed proliferated, shape-shifting into an entirely new composition. If paintings and museums keep culture static, might these living works inflect more dynamic, reflective memories? 

Like Living and Dying in the Bacteriacene, Jes Fan’s Systems II (2018) melds geometric and organic forms and uses an encasement as an aesthetic approach. Here, an armature encased in lumpy, fleshy resin props a sequence of blown glass orbs, each encasing a crystalline silicon, which in turn encases synthesized biological materials including Depo-Testosterone, Estradiol, and melanin. Like a skeleton housing a biological system, Systems II thus envelops an ecosystem of trillions of microbes; however, by encasing the organic material within the glass, Jens disables it.  

Scientific exploration and proliferation of human cells are tenderly considered by Crystal Z Campbell’s series of three works that contend with the legacy of Henrietta Lacks. Before she died in 1951, the thirty-one-year-old Black woman’s cervical cancer cells were harvested from her body with her consent, replicated in a lab, and used for countless medical advances. Lacks’s cells continue to be used today, but her family was only notified of their use in 1975 and has never received any compensation. In Friends of Friends (Six Degrees of Separation, 2013-14), Campbell has placed a series of aging bacteria slides from the 1940s into a filmic, backlit stripe. In each, labels indicate what the slides hold, and one indicates that it holds Lack’s cells. The work's title alludes both to the “medical friendship” between a doctor and patient and to the privacy robbed of Lacks. There’s an intimacy in this work that is underscored in a pair of sculptures, Portrait of a Woman I and Portrait of a Woman II (2013), each a short, dark obelisk sheathing a portrait of Lacks at roughly hip height. These memorials to Lacks bear witness to her experience as a Black woman in the Jim Crow South, attributing humanity and dignity withheld from Lacks during her lifetime, though we continue to benefit from her cells. 

In the next room is the literally monumental, gallery-sized Plantas autofotosintéticas [Autophotosynthetic Plants] (2013-14) from Gilberto Esparza. This spider-like network consists of twelve microbial fuel cell towers, each filtering wastewater gathered at different local sites into a central nucleus, which houses plants, fish, and other organisms. Installed in a dark room, the towers produce a humming sound and flashes of light as they transform organic waste into electricity. Literally displaying symbionts, this work exhibits how interdependent living beings are. The installation is accompanied by a monitoring station detailing the water’s origin and treatment as well as two short documentaries Esparza created exploring the political use of wastewater. One focuses on Boston, the other Mexico City, where the work was previously shown. In both, Esparza interviews local politicians, administrators, and residents, injecting the spectacle of the installation with a more personal, communal feeling amid the minutiae of water treatment expertise. The most energetic and stimulating discussions I overheard were in this room, with viewers parsing out the pieces of the installation or recalling their own experiences with water. 

It was quiet across the hall in the project space, where Pierre Huyghe’s Spider (2014) and Pamela Rosenkranz’s She Has No Mouth (2017) were installed. I entered the room feeling watched–as if dozens of daddy long-leg eyes were following me–and expected to be hit with a smell emanating from Rosenkranz’s perfume-infused LED-lit circle of sand. But no one was observing me, and no scent reached my nose; besides the purple sand circle of She Has No Mouth, the dim room seemed empty save for a wooden bench. As I made my way to it, only light (human) foot tracks and brush marks in the sand indicated someone had been there before, breaking all the “no touching” rules. Sitting down, alone, I noticed the ambient noise of an HVAC system; slowly I began to see spiders still in their corner webs. According to the curators, ninety-six spiders had been released in the room since the exhibition’s October opening, which meant that the majority had surely made their way by then to other parts of the building. These “cellar spiders” are ubiquitous in this part of the world, inhabiting dark corners of our homes, and they are essential to our ecosystems. Like other works of institutional critique in Symbionts, the curators write in their wall text, Spider makes us cognizant of these seemingly invisible but omnipresent life forms as well as the human desire to “surveil” them, as in a museological display. 

The strength of Spider and all of Symbionts is not only this awareness, but the conversations that such work provokes. These discussions encompass our relationships with memory, institutions, and collections, as well as with non-human beings and their value in the world. As Symbionts demonstrates, this dialogue, or symbiosis, between the human and non-human goes beyond conversation into metabolic interchange. 

Leah Triplett Harrington is a curator, writer, and editor. She is newly based in Philadelphia.