Dana-Fiona Armour at Radicants, Palazzo Bolani, Venice, Italy: Group-exhibition

20 April - 26 June 2022 
Nicolas Bourriaud invites artists from all around the world to question the contemporaneity of the romantic concept of the sublime, at the age of the anthropocene.
 
By changing our collective relationship with the planet, global warming has transformed the artist's gaze. Today, the Romantic concept of the "sublime", grounded in the connection between humans and nature, takes a new turn: defined as a feeling of "delight tinged with horror" and by the contrast between the individual and immensity, the sublime becomes the aesthetic notion that determines the Anthropocene.

In Planet B. Climate Change and the New Sublime, Nicolas Bourriaud brings together artists from around the world in an exhibition in three acts: 1. Every exhibition is a forest. 2. Charles Darwin and the coral reefs. 3. The tragic death of Nauru Island.
 
Works by Nils Alix-Tabeling, Dana-Fiona Armour, Charles Avery, Gianfranco Baruchello, Hicham Berrada, Bianca Bondi, Peter Buggenhout, Roberto Cabot, Alex Cerveny, Anna Conway, Sterling Crispin, Kendell Geers, Anna Bella Geiger, Loris Gréaud, Max Hooper Schneider, Agata Ingarden, Per Kirkeby, Agnieszka Kurant, Romana Londi, Turiya Magadlela, Lucia Pizzani, Thiago Rocha Pitta, Ylva Snöfrid, Nicolás Uriburu, Ambera Wellmann, Haegue Yang, Phillip Zach.
 
 

Pneumatophores, 2022
Glass, melanocortin (melanin), oxides, metallic salts, dimensions variable

 

Scan Micro CT Nicotiana Benthamiana – pre transgenesis, 2022
Virtual Reality, 6’13 »
In collaboration with Constance Valero and Lorenzo Furlan

Special thanks to Dominique Rumeau (BIAM)

 

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In the age of bio-editing there is no longer any real distinction between humans, animals, plants, objects, synthetic and organic materials. With a desire to create a diagnostic of the reality around us, Armour creates hybrid works where the organic blends with the rigid forms of minimalism and conceptual art.
Armour transcends the boundaries of material and species into a new form, imbued with a strange sensuality. Bringing materiality to the forefront, her works consist of artificial silicone skins, smooth pink stones reminiscent of organic fragments, and blown glass with organic inclusions in layered patterns.
Armour has a trans-disciplinary practice where science plays a fundamental role in her research and visual work. She is currently the first artist-in-residence at Cellectis, a genome engineering company.
It is here that her project « MC1R » was born, a creation of a hybrid plant carrying the human genome infiltrated in the form of a virus.

 

Assimilating sculpture to a dissection protocol aiming at establishing new relationships between the artist’s body and her work, Dana-Fiona Armour practices metabolism. Metabolism is the set of chemical reactions that occur within a living being and allow it to maintain itself in life, to reproduce itself, to develop. Armour’s works materialize, in the body of her works, the phenomena that occur in other living environments, human or non-human. She uses blood, skin, animal organs, as well as synthetic materials, as one can no longer draw clear boundaries between the « natural » and the « artificial ».

-Nicolas Bourriaud