For the past three years, Johannesburg-based artist, Leora Farber has engaged with bioart an umbrella term for a range of art forms that engage critically with biomaterials and bioscientific practices – in innovative and exciting ways.
‘Bioartists’ mix artistic and scientific practices, often using live tissues, bacteria, living organisms and life processes as media. In the video works featured on the ghosted matter, phantom hurt (and other chimera) installation, Farber extends her use of biomaterials and micro-organisms as matter into the digital realm.
Farber’s material ‘impressions’ of domestic objects – made either from a cellulose-fibre produced by the symbiotic action of the bacteria and yeast or from a mixture of agar and bacterial nutrient onto which pigmented bacteria are grown – already inhabit an ever-changing state of in-betweenness, slipping in-between the visceral and the ephemeral, the tactile and the translucent, the real and the imagined. Translated into video, the impressions appear and disappear across the screen as ghostly, weightless, ephemeral, ethereal, transient forms (which often dissolve into formlessness); they become fleeting semblances of presence which simultaneously unfold into absence. Through these precarious images of ‘things’ that are barely things, the viewer-participant is invited to try and grasp the ungraspable – fugitive, fragmented remembrances of familiarity, strangeness, comfort, dis-ease, intimacy, distance, vulnerability, trauma, complicity and loss.
The original objects from which Farber’s impressions are taken range in design, period and surface patterning. They include items taken from English bone china — such as plates, teacups, saucers, bowls and glassware — and reference traditional English styling and patterning found in Royal Doulton, Royal Albert, and Royal Worcester ranges. Some of the casts feature the blue and white patterns of Chinese origin which the British copied in their production of blue and white 18th century porcelain, and the Dutch reproduced in their ‘Delft blue’ porcelain. These designs, which are still being produced by the original companies, or reproductions thereof, have become domestic ‘classics’ in post-colonies such as South Africa and Australia.
In their reference to the troubled history of West-East cross-cultural and economic exchange, the objects resonate as spectral traces of the violent colonial legacies that haunt post-colonial domestic interiors. As hauntologies of British and Dutch Imperialism and colonialism – the very mechanisms that drove the enculturation of capital, set against an historical backdrop of dispossession, exploitation, genocide, displacement and precarity – the filmic impressions evoke uncanny spectres of disquietude that continue to inhabit the present, and haunt the future.
Artist’s statement
For the past three years, I have engaged intensively with bioart an umbrella term for a range of art forms that engage critically with biomaterials and bioscientific practices. ‘Bioartists’ mix artistic and scientific practices, often using live tissues, bacteria, living organisms and life processes as media.
The ‘impressions’ of domestic objects that feature in the ghosted matter, phantom hurt (and other chimera) video installation – the third in a series of installations that began in 2020 and will continue into 2022 – are made through an experimental combination of biomaterials and microbes.
The impressions imaged in ghosted matter (2018-2021) and chimera (2021) are made from a cellulose-fibre produced by the symbiotic action of the bacteria Gluconacetobacter xylinus and yeast. This culture, which feeds off a mixture of tea and sugar, forms a biofilm at the interface between the liquid nutrient and air. The biofilm grows to form a cellulose fibre that when dehydrated, bears uncanny resemblance to traces of human skin – sloughed off, shed, discarded. In phantom hurt (2019-2021), the impressions are made from a solidified mixture of agar and bacterial nutrient, onto which live, naturally pigmented, mildly pathogenic bacteria have been painted. Inscribed into, imprinted onto, or infused with the translucent jelly-like substrate, the bacteria grow unpredictably and uncontrollably in response to the patterns or surface applications that I attempt to create for them. In both instances, rather than being the product of my creative efforts alone, the work is made through collaboration between the micro-organisms and myself; they happen ‘with’ the agencies of the microbes in a dynamic process of organic exchange.
In the videos, the impressions appear and disappear, hovering restlessly in a liminal space of constant becoming. In their initial forms as material matter, they already inhabit an ever-changing state of in-betweenness, slipping in-between life and death; visibility and invisibility; human and other-than-human; actuality and imagination; being and non-being; (semi)living and non-living. This sense of liminality is heightened when the impressions are translated into digital media, which, in itself, foregrounds the transientness of light, time and space. From their states as matter which evokes both the visceral and the ephemeral, the tactile and the translucent, when translated into video, the impressions appear and disappear across the screen as ghostly, weightless, ephemeral, ethereal, transient forms (which often dissolve into formlessness); they become fleeting semblances of presence which simultaneously unfold into absence. Through these precarious ‘things’ that are barely things, the viewer-participant is invited to try and grasp the ungraspable – fugitive, fragmented remembrances of familiarity, strangeness, comfort, dis-ease, intimacy, distance, vulnerability, trauma, complicity and loss
The impressions reference various design styles, periods and surface patterning. They include items taken from Chinese porcelain and English bone china; some feature blue and white patterns of Chinese origin, such as the willow pattern, which the British copied in their production of 18th century porcelain, and the Dutch reproduced in their ‘Delft blue’ porcelain. These designs, which are still being produced by the original companies, or reproductions thereof, have become domestic ‘classics’ in post-colonies such as South Africa and Australia. In these contexts, the objects, as well as the actual and filmic impressions I take of them, thus resonate as spectral traces of the violent colonial legacies that haunt domestic interiors and broader individual and collective imaginations. They carry hauntological resonances of British and Dutch Imperialism and colonialism – the very mechanisms that drove the enculturation of capital. Sugar, tea and porcelain were commodities of colonial commerce that were shipped by the Dutch East India and the British East India companies to the colonies alongside enslaved peoples, themselves considered fungible objects of trade. Read against this historical backdrop of dispossession, exploitation, genocide, displacement and precarity, the filmic impressions may be seen as uncanny spectres of disquietude that continue to inhabit the present, and will continue to haunt the future. They are like “ghosts … weeds that whisper… of the many pasts and yet-to comes that surround us”.
The impressions featured in phantom hurt were produced in a microbiology laboratory at the QEII Medical Centre, Nedlands, Perth, in collaboration with Dr Kate Hammer, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director Graduate Programs in Infectious Diseases, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Western Australia. The work was made during Farber’s residency at the SymbioticA Centre of Excellence for Biological Arts, University of Western Australia (September 2019-January 2020)
The ghosted matter, phantom hurt (and other chimera) installation will be shown at Gallery25, Edith Cowan University, Perth from 1-22 July 2021; FADA Gallery, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg from 22 July-30 August 2021, and on the University of Johannesburg’s Art & Culture’s Moving Cube virtual platform from 22 August- 10 Septemeber 2021.
The work was made possible through the generous funding provided by the South African National Research Council and the University of Johannesburg Research Committee.