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Polona Tratnik: Bio Art as Tactical Media
15.10.2015 11:00

Polona Tratnik: Bio Art as Tactical Media

– lecture MFRU-KIBLIX 2015:
Thursday, October 15, 2015, KIBLA PORTAL at 11.00

In the beginning of the Millennium Bio Art has become one of the central genres of contemporary art. It is signified by thematizing the advent of the age of biotechnology with all its prospects in manipulating the living of the world: the body, animals and plants for various objectives, such as the food industry, medicine, pharmacy, aesthetics, etc. For the art that won the title Bio Art it is significant to include biotechnology in its procedures and displays this inclusion in its performances, production of the living “sculptures”, performative installations, and workshops. With this imperative the Bio Art projects become very demanding in their realization and sometimes rather hermetic in their discourse.
Bio Art could be recognized as a Western or capitalist phenomenon in the sense of its ensign or promotion, but there exist also very critical and innovative, even avant-garde encounters with biotechnology in the truly transdisciplinary art-biotechnology-humanities projects, by default produced in the ex-communist countries.

Polona Tratnik, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate and Associate Professor for philosophy of culture, is president of the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics and holds courses at the Faculty for Education, University of Maribor and the Faculty for Design, University of Primorska. She is Associate Professor for theory of art and media at Singidunum University, Faculty for Media and Communication. She was Head of the Department for Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Primorska. In 2012 she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar and a Guest Professor at University of California Santa Cruz. She was a Guest Professor also in Bejing, Helsinki and Mexico. She is an author of five monographs, among others of the Hacer-vivir más allá del cuerpo y del medio (Mexico City: Herder, 2013). Since 2010 she is a member of the research group Arte+Ciencia at the Faculdad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

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