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San Francisco is showcasing SymbioticA’s highly acclaimed research group the Tissue Culture & Art Project’s latest artwork, NoArk. Held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, BioTechnique features an international selection of artworks that have been “grown” rather than manufactured.

SymbioticA co-founder and artistic director, Oron Catts with Tissue Culture & Art Project collaborator Ionat Zurr’s work, NoArk, is an updated version of a Wunderkammer, the cabinets of curiosity that preceded the natural history museum’s refined taxonomy of organisms, objects, and other physical wonders. Their collection includes a living mass of growing cells, taking the form of tissue in a state-of-the-art biotech incubator. NoArk’s protective vessel is a new type of body in the world, brought together as the assembled parts of different organisms, merged with technological support systems.

The Tissue Culture and Art Project has explored the use of tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression since 1996, and in 2000 became one of the core research projects at SymbioticA, The Art and Science Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia. SymbioticA are the recent winners of the inaugural Golden Nica for Hybrid Art as part of the international Prix Ars Electronica 2007.

BioTechnique offers a visually rich assortment of organisms, semi-living objects, and intricate life support systems that shines the light on the technologies that are changing the global economy and the earth itself. These hybrid objects, from sheltering vessels to semi-living diagnostic tools being developed in Silicon Valley, provide context for the artworks and further explore the increasingly fuzzy line between the technological and the natural. Guest curated by Philip Ross, the show runs from Oct 26, 2007–Jan 6, 2008.

YBCA Galleries is located at:
701 Mission St. at Third
San Francisco, CA

For more information on the exhibition, please visit:
https://www.ybca.org/tickets/production.aspx?performanceNumber=4439

Media references

Amanda Alderson (Manager) 61 8 6488 7116
SymbioticA - The Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory