I collaborated with Anicka Yi on the opening of her exhibit, You can call me F, at The Kitchen in New York City (March 5, 2015). For the show we collected and grew 100 different samples of bacteria from women in Anicka's network, and constructed a 7 ft long Petri dish with these bacteria entitled Grabbing At New Vegetables. Anicka and I also taught an IAP workshop at MIT called "The Art and Science of Bacteria" hosted by the Center for Art, Science, and Technology.
In You Can Call me F by artist Anicka Yi, The Kitchen's gallery will function as a forensic site in which the artist aligns society's growing paranoia around contagion and hygiene, both public and private, with the enduring patriarchal fear of feminism and potency of female networks. Yi manifests and aggregates this potency by calling upon 100 women in her professional network-- fellow artists, curators, dealers, and collectors-- to donate biological information samples in order to create a collective bacteria under the guidance of synthetic biologist Tal Danino. These networks additionally place themselves with The Kitchen's history as a natural "breeding ground" for artistic collaboration.
This work was featured in The Creators Project, the cover of the March 2015 edition of ArtForum, along with a piece in TheScientist.com on our IAP workshop. Credits: Photos 1-9 ArtForum magazine, Photo 10 Jason Mandella (The Kitchen), Photos 11-16 Tal Danino, Photo 17 Anicka Yi.