HOLOBIONT. LIFE IS OTHER
We are inhabited by bacteria and viruses, just as we humans inhabit homes, cities and environments. We also serve as hosts for ideologies, media and technologies. The term 'holobiont', coined in 1991 by biologist Lynn Margulis, describes us as a total living being permeated by the biosphere. 'Holobiont' explodes the self-understanding of individual life, links us symbiotically with other organisms via our microbiome, disrupts the division into subject and object and offends our usual ego concept..
The social and psychological transformations of the last few months bring to mind that 'life' is above all that of other than human actors.
Simple demarcations no longer stand up to this dynamic. We' experience 'us' as transitory beings drifting between digital and molecular worlds and sense the twisting of boundaries within us as the possibility of a new language beyond a symbolic distance from the world.
With the exhibition HOLOBIONT, Magazin4 shows bodies, environments, texts, media, machines and biological organisms - condensed into ten pictorial spaces, each of which represents a narrative about another life and about the lives of others: LIFE IS OTHER! Using different methods, theoretical concepts, processes and metaphors, the gallery becomes a "holospace" - a magazine within a magazine.
With contributions by Art Orienté Objet, Irini Athanassakis, David Berry, Julia Borovaya, Juan M. Castro & Akihiro Kubota, Tagny Duff, Thomas Feuerstein, Ana Maria Gomez Lopez, Luis Hernan/Pei-Ying Lin/Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa, Nigel Helyer, Hideo Iwasaki, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Eduardo Kac, Lynn Margulis/Dorion Sagan/Bruce Clarke, Yann Marussich, our alumna Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Gerald Nestler, ORLAN, Špela Petrič, Chris Salter, Maja Smrekar, Klaus Spiess, our alumna Lucie Strecker/KT Zakravsky, Franco Vaccari, Paul Vanouse, M R Vishnuprasad and Peter Weibel.
Curated by Judith Reichart, alumna Lucie Strecker, Thomas Feuerstein, Jens Hauser and Magazin4.
When? Where?
17 April – 20 June 2021 (opening: 16 April, 3-5pm)
Magazin4
Bergmannstraße 6
6900 Bregenz