The practice of Anicka Yi enacts sculptural collaborations between human and non-human agents. It elides the boundary between the organism and the machine, querying the nature of “natural” intelligence. Yi has developed a complex, at once “techno-sensual” (her own term) and highly conceptual, aesthetics of symbiosis that cross-contaminates critical vitalism and posthumanism, feminist art practices, the biological sciences, and anti-capitalist and anti-nationalist activism. Embedded in research practices that move in undisciplined yet rigorous ways between art and science, Le Pain Symbiotique interrogates what it means to re-present the microbiome of the gut and plays with the analogically entwined scales of microcosm and macrocosm. The work invites visitors to circumnavigate a large, transparent PVC cellular structure carpeted in a bright ochre dough. Through the room’s sheer membrane, they can watch bacterial activity projected onto gently lit glycerin and resin sculpture-screens. Incubating microbial yeast, mold, and bacteria, the hermetically sealed room suggests a biosphere that we have been locked out of. Le Pain Symbiotique emerged out of Yi’s yearslong thinking about metabolism, the cluster of chemical processes that transform ingested matter into life-sustaining energy through the collective labor of the gut’s microbial community. Appropriating the aesthetics of the laboratory, where forms of life are subjected to experimentation and hybridization by human agency, the work stages performances of micro-organismic metamorphoses that hauntingly evoke those occurring beneath the visitor’s own skin.

(Brooke Holmes)