Experimentations 2: Rethinking Bodies, Rethinking Gender: Biology’s Expansive Otherworlds

Our Body is a Planet

  Léonie Hampton, 2022, digital, color, sound, 11 min.

This film is the result of the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology’s exploratory artist’s residency with Devon-based artist Léonie Hampton of Still/Moving, in partnership with Arts and Culture, University of Exeter.

“This residency has been a deeply inspiring and enriching experience. A blend of horror and beauty grew as I learnt from the stories and images about fungi that the scientists shared with me. The film is truly a collaborative outcome that tries to capture the journey I was taken on. Thank you to everyone who contributed their thoughts, time and work to make this film come alive. “ Léonie

Léonie has an internationally acclaimed art practice. She studied Art history, specialising in contemporary European and American art, and is a part time AL Associate lecturer in photography at LCC London. Martin studied architecture at the Bartlett and visual anthropology at Goldsmiths. He is a maker of films and sculptures, and a grower of vegetables. Laura is an artist and post-doctoral researcher, focusing upon the relationship between climate change and colonisation.

Yummy Body Truck

By Noam Youngrak Son, 2021, digital, color, sound, 7 min.

Noam Youngrak Son’s YUMMY BODY TRUCK is a fictional food truck that sells edible human body parts. What sounds like cannibalism at first turns out to be a biotechno-queer fantasy of interspecies mixing – quite literally so. In the computer-generated video, the pancake-shaped head of a "fluidic chimera" tells of its creation: that a rapidly spinning blade has taken on a multitude of organisms – from bacteria and fungi to plants, insects, reptiles… and also sometimes hominids – ingested, ground up their flesh and mixed it all into a malleable paste of diverse cells, organelles, DNA, enzymes, hormones, pigments, toxins: a pool of proteins, amino acids, nucleic acids, phospholipids, and all sorts of different polymers with all sorts of unidentifiable energy states and genetic information. This mushy mass is now being modeled into human body shapes in the YUMMY BODY TRUCK – similar to the multi-species convergence from fishing waste being reshaped into desirable seafood as surimi.

How Old Are You? How Old Were You? 入世    

How Old Are You? How Old Were You? 入世    

By Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, 2017, 16mm, color, sound, 16 min.

Shot on 16mm film using a handmade camera obscura, How Old Are You? How Old Were You? fractures the logic of time to contemplate bringing oneself back to the origin, the womb. A dialogue between two selves – infant and adult, the film traverses through a series of psychological events, transforming memories, emotions, thoughts, and imagination. 

Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work is grounded in literature and the conceptual avant-garde. Cherlyn’s creative activity often starts from a life event or curiosity concerning an anomaly in language or in the aging material world. Her working method at various times involves handcrafted material, mixed media, and experimental interchange between new and old technologies. Cherlyn’s films have been shown internationally at venues and festivals including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Helsinki Festival (Finland), Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, Image Forum Festival (Japan), Crossroads Film Festival at SFMoMA (USA), among others. She received the Jury Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival for How Old Are You? How Old Were You?.

The Posthuman Hospital

The Posthuman Hospital

By Junha Kim, 2023, 5 in.

The film showcases medical records of posthuman patients in an imaginary hospital through experimental digital images.

“The Posthuman Hospital is an experimental animation project inspired by Donna Haraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto.' This film explores the uncertain boundaries between the non-human and the human in the context of technological advancement and the human body's relationship to it. The director utilizes various digital techniques to create a unique visual experience, including 3D scanning of everyday objects and overlaying super 8mm film scans onto 3D images to preserve the feel of film footage. Through these experimental images, the film presents a unique visual experience that questions the relationship between humans and technological entities, moving beyond Cartesian dualism. It does so by showcasing medical records of several posthuman patients in an imaginary hospital, offering insights into the interactions between humans and technological entities.”

Mother is a Woman

Mother is a Woman

By Jes Fan, 2018, 4 min.

In “Mother is a Woman”, Fan extracted estrogen from urine samples collected from their post-menopausal mother. This estrogen was then blended into a face cream and distributed to Fan’s network of non-biological kin. This project grapples with the slippery constitution of “natural” and “synthetic” genders, posing a series of seemingly absurd questions: What happens if I re-feminize my body with my mother’s estrogen? If your body absorbs my mother’s estrogen, are you feminized by her? If so, who are you to her, and who are you to me? Can our epidermis be our first contact of kinship? Can kinship be infectious?

Xenophoria

Xenophoria

By Jes Fan, 2018-2020, 7 min.

"Xenophoria" chronicles Fan’s pursuit of eumelanin pigment, the molecule responsible for skin color found in both human and non-human bodies. Referencing the aesthetics of both microscopic imagery and autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos, "Xenophoria" includes actions such as dissecting squids and bursting their ink sacs, harvesting fungi with scalpels, and locating bodily moles, irises and skin. The work also includes close-ups of bulbous tumors protruding from faces in the medical paintings by Qing Dynasty painter Lam Qua. In this work, Fan presents an absurdist investigation and fetishization of the molecule responsible for centuries of racial othering, suggesting how this molecule in fact exists within all of us, human or not.

Jes Fan (b. 1990, Canada) is a Brooklyn-based artist who was raised in Hong Kong. He frequently employs organic materials and other components that invoke the body to explore the queer possibilities of nature and animacy. In his biomorphic forms and tactile sculptures, Fan places the visual elements of human contour—something biological and living—alongside the angular geometric tubings to evoke visceral responses from his viewers. Throughout his practice, Fan examines complex ideas of sexuality, gender, race, and species to complicate binary thinking.

Autodidact

Autodidact

By Jeamin Cha, 2014, South Korea, HD digital, color, sound, 9 min.

Youngchun Hur is the father of Private Wonkeun Hur who lost his life in 1984 (during the Fifth Republic of Korea). Suspecting the death of his son, Mr. Hur taught himself forensic medicine to reveal the truth. Autodidact was initiated by my meeting with Mr. Hur, at that time, a family member of the victim as well as an unofficial forensic investigator. The video shows magnified images of Mr. Hur’s investigative materials he studied and his handwritings, while two different narrators tell a story. (The script was made based on my conversation with Mr. Hur about his struggles, in which he went against the state’s cracking down on his attempt to unearth the truth over the last 30 years. The topics of conversation also include politics and key life events of the time, and the forensic evidence he found.) The two alternating narrators are Mr. Hur himself and a man in his early twenties. The work attempts to reflect the “voice” of the others through reading the material only with eyes, reading aloud, and re-reading by a different person’s voice.

Jeamin Cha is an artist based in Seoul whose practice spans film, performance, installation, and writing. Cha’s work deals with the relationship between the psychological, emotional, and physical. She approaches the reality of individuals through processes of field studies and notes personal interviews of hard-to-articulate experiences. It is also interested in preserving unknown areas that are gradually shrinking as technology advances. Cha has participated in numerous group exhibitions and festivals, including EVA International; Singapore Biennale; Leeum Museum of Art; Asian Culture Center; Film at Lincoln Center; KADIST; Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art; Gwangju Biennale; Seoul Museum of Art Biennale Mediacity; Berlin International Film Festival; International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

Bodies and Places are Contiguous

Bodies and Places are Contiguous

By Maria Fernandez Pello, 2021, 10 min.

Earth’s surface cuts across every one of us, it traverses our bodies in the shape of a tube, challenging distinctions between the inside and the outside, the body and the world, self and nonself. Bodies And Places Are Contiguous is a visual experiment, an effort to attend to the recurrent cylindrical formations that permeate human bodies, our technology, our parasites, and most of our cities’ infrastructures. Through a focus on form, the project seeks to generate unexpected connections between categories often seen as entirely separate from each other. The connections that emerge from the repeated attention to tubes are also seen as a challenge to traditionally bounded understandings of the human, the body, and the world. In the film, as inside of any tube, perspective is lost, there is no up nor down, inside or outside, just a dizzying encounter with sameness. Music score improvised by Marina Peterson and Cassius Walker.

Maria Fernández Pello is a visual artist and researcher from Madrid, Spain, working at the intersection of documentary art and biomedical science. Her current project explores the use of live microorganisms to treat autoimmune conditions, and how these therapies are redefining the boundaries between the body and the world, sensation and affect, materiality and media. She is also pursuing a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at UT Austin. Her work has been presented in exhibitions and film festivals worldwide.