Art Laboratory Berlin is delighted to invite you to take part in our Colloquium (this time both online and on-site!), a discursive format on research in art, science and humanities, curated by Regine Rapp. It takes place in tandem with our Reading Club, curated by Tuçe Erel.

The colloquium addresses an international interdisciplinary research audience to present and discuss past, present, or future projects by artists and scholars, curators or editors from the fields of art, science and the humanities. The topics could refer to an art project, a book, text or chapter, a research or exhibition project, a lab experiment, a lecture series, a conference concept or other.

The presentations and exchange will focus on the work-in-progress. Methodological approaches – theoretical or practical – are also of great interest here. While researching, we often tend to shift between practical inquiry and theoretical research, browsing various disciplines. Following the original meaning of colloquium as “speaking together”, we want to provide a platform for exchange and embrace various kinds of work processes which are often not seen or talked about.

The colloquium welcomes informal conversations amongst the participants, and will not be recorded or archived.

Speaker on 15 October 2024 Session

Ionat Zurr | Artificial Environments of Production and Reproduction

Associate Professor Ionat Zurr is an artist and a researcher who formed the Tissue Culture & Art Project in 1996 which led to the establishment of SymbioticA Laboratory the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, the University of Western Australia (UWA) in 2000. She is working at the Fine Arts Discipline, School of Design UWA, in Perth, Australia. Zurr is considered as one of the pioneers in the field of Biological Art. Zurr exhibited in places such as Pompidou Centre, Paris; MoMA, New York; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; GoMA, Australia; Ars Electronica, Linz; and more. She published extensively and her recent co-authored book Tissues, Cultures, Art was published by Palgrave McMillan in 2023.

In the colloquium Ionat will give a talk titled Artificial Environments of Production and Reproduction: Human desire to control, replicate, and improve on the “natural world” will be explored, focusing on systems of food production and the artificial womb for reproduction. These systems of automation and standardisation call for a separation from nature. Ionat will focus on two recent projects and their interrelations. The first concerns with the outsourcing of the female reproduction body to the machine while the latter explores feminine proteins and AgTech’s ambition to automate and control food production. Here Ionat will explore the trials of productive and reproductive artificial systems, whether born, grown, or constructed, human and non-human and how this “nature free” desire reflects back on us.