Caged Bacteria (2008)
keywords: petridish, laboratory, student work, sculpture
Caged Bacteria are petri dishes turned into small wire cages.
Caged Bacteria were influenced by discussions on boundaries and mutual exchange. They are a play between openness and closeness and a visual contradiction of intuitively tight structures and practices. Petri dishes are to be sealed; cages are to constrain animal life, but what becomes of a petri dish cage? And how does it compare to the usual inhabitancies of laboratory life?
Caged Bacteria are also the result of my personal interest in practices of display. They remember traditions of displaying life and briefly contemplate the potential rhetorics of displays of bioart works. Were we to put GMOs into the cages, would they be imprisoned? Were we to bring bioart in the museum, would it be behind bars?
- Presented at:
- "InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies", performance/ picnic at the garden (Museumtuin) of the National Museum of Ethnology (Museum Volkenkunde) in Leiden, 2008.
- Related links:
- Caged Bacteria were created during the Leiden University honours class "BioArt: Contemporary Art and the Life Sciences", led by Jennifer Willet.