Events

The event Viral Geographies is an online program on behalf of our current Under the Viral Shadow project, exploring the biopolitics in our current age of pandemic. The online discussion welcomes artists Sybille Neumeyer and Karolina Żyniewicz to talk about their artistic research focusing on the virus in general as well as the impact of the current pandemic in their artistic practice.

Sybille Neumeyer will reflect on Voicing encounters – a narrative cartography of virus, developed in dialogue with experts and scientists for KOEXISTENZ, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, 2019, as part of Contagious Cities by Wellcome Trust. The artistic walk combines collective reading, non-linear narration, and psychogeographic explorations of the city. Introducing the concept of polyphonic (hi)storytelling, the artist fathoms transformative narratives, anticipatory memory, and speculative worlding. Karolina Żyniewicz will talk about how her practice and how the Coronavirus pandemic shaped during this time. It seems to be almost inappropriate still to discuss the topic of the pandemic and the Coronavirus. Everybody is already tired of the topic and wants to forget that a tiny agent, invisible to the naked eye, a virus, reminded us of our interdependence, physicality, embodiment, and vulnerability.

We continue our project Under the Viral Shadow with an online discussion exploring the biopolitics in our current age of pandemic: As we face the prospect of the SarsCov-2 virus becoming endemic for the foreseeable future we ask what does “Living with the Virus” mean for us and individuals and as a society. We have asked three artists working at the borders of art and the life sciences to talk about how viral infection, contagion and potential cure has affected their lives and work.

Living together with a virus is a lonely way of being for Caitlin Berrigan: “As my peers individuated from dependent adolescents into adulthood, my coming of age was not as a singular human subject. I was already multiple: a human carrying an alien viral load.” WhiteFeather, in return, will highlight the ways in which she adapted her research to support not only her very long recovery (after getting infected with SARS Cov-2 in March 2020), but also her ongoing critique of the inherent misogyny in biomedical research fields. Sebastian Cocioba’s work, finally, translates abstract ideas of information, communication, and relationship with the natural world into tangible visualizations of the machinery of life, often through protein synthesis. He will reflect on his work and his experiences with having been infected with SARS Cov-2.