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Visiting MU Artspace, Eindhoven for New Scientist, 20 January 2018<\/a><\/p>\n Making art out of biological material, living tissue or even recordings of whole ecosystems is no longer a new idea. In fact it is one that is fast approaching its majority: SymbioticA, the pioneering art and science research laboratory that did so much to establish the field, was opened in 2001.<\/p>\n Life Time, a small show running at MU Artspace in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, shows this quintessentially 21st-century art at its best. Few pieces here would ever find their way into a regular gallery. A striking exception is An Incomplete Life, a performance installation by Dutch physical theatre company Wild Vlees (styling itself as Proud Flesh in English), in which a recumbent actor is slowly engulfed by a pile of salt spilling from the inverted cone of a giant hourglass.<\/p>\n More often, the artists take the scatter-gun conceit-making of traditional conceptual art and push it towards real experiment and analysis. The pieces that result are more interesting than beautiful, but with good curation this need not be a problem. It would be a dull gallery-goer who didn\u2019t appreciate the exhibits, including those by finalists of the 2017 Bio Art and Design Award.<\/p>\n The BADs, developed with leading Dutch researchers in the life sciences, have been pushing the boundaries of bio art since 2011. Three winners from last year take centre stage.<\/p>\n South Korean artist Jiwon Woo collaborated with Han W\u00f6sten of Utrecht University to study whether there is a bacterial or fungal basis to the Korean notion of son-mat or \u201chand taste\u201d \u2013 the subtleties of flavour imparted to food by the person who prepares it. Some local hooch-making kit was on display \u2013 in case you didn\u2019t get the point.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s an immersive eight-channel audio installation called Seasynthesis: a thudding and horrific distillation of the sound pollution besetting the North Sea. This is the work of Dutch artist Xandra van der Eijk, working with Han Lindeboom at Wageningen University.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Chinese artist Guo Cheng has worked with Heather Leslie at Free University Amsterdam on a Canutic effort to remove all traces of human activity from a cubic metre of soil taken from a dockyard in the city, sorting, washing and rinsing, and removing rubble, plastics and other chemicals. The Anthropocene has never seemed so immediate, or so insidious, as in this video installation.<\/p>\n So much for the art. What of the curation? MU Artspace\u2019s show juxtaposes the BAD shortlist with works by more established artists to make a statement about the nature of time.<\/p>\n Time is difficult to talk about \u2013 the show\u2019s cumbersome title is proof enough of that, and even the gallery\u2019s lucid handout by William Myers, a curator based in Amsterdam, labours under the title \u201cA Non-Circadian Cadence\u201d. But the show itself does much better, embracing a wide swathe of temporal landscape, \u201cfrom the universal to the personal and from the cellular to the geological\u201d. Time, we are told, is \u201csimultaneously binding us, through heredity, and separating us, by death\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cEx Nihilo affords us an ice-cold glimpse of a bureaucratic, post-natural future\u201d Noah Hutton\u2019s film Deep Time documents the destruction of the oil-rich North Dakotan landscape by 1970s-style big engineering. And Ex Nihilo by Finnish artist Timo Wright juxtaposes footage from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a frozen brain being prepared by a cryonics company, and a workshop working on an advanced humanoid robot to afford us an ice-cold glimpse of a bureaucratic, post-natural future.<\/p>\n Visiting Life Time is rather like watching one of those allusive, polymathic documentaries by British documentary film-maker Adam Curtis. While the show exhibits some of the method\u2019s shortcomings, it manages the old Curtis trick of delivering much more than the sum of its parts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Visiting MU Artspace, Eindhoven for New Scientist, 20 January 2018 Making art out of biological material, living tissue or even recordings of whole ecosystems is no longer a new idea. In fact it is one that is fast approaching its … Continue reading
\nIt is significant, I think, that of the works by established artists featured here, the strongest are two video pieces.<\/p>\n