Artists in attendance
In person and online
Microscope is very pleased to present the first 2024 edition of our emerging series YES with a screening of works by New York-based artists Nancy Dayanne Valladares and HSURAE.
The roughly 60-minute program of works by Valladares and HSURAE — who also collaborated on two of the videos — delve into the microbial universe that constitutes our existences, approached from the perspective of infinitesimal, often genderless, perpetually roaming organisms to which life, subject and object, time and space take on very different meanings than those we are accustomed to as humans.
In their videos, Valladares investigates forms of botanical exchange underlining the connections between plant transportation and colonial missions of the late 1700s and imagines what the seeds may have experienced during these transcontinental voyages through air and water. The Density of Breath is built upon the facts surrounding Captain’s Cook 1769 expedition to Tahiti, in which botanist Joseph Banks discovered breadfruit and its potential as inexpensive food for British slaves in the Caribbean. Recorded with a digital microscope, the work gradually reveals the indiscernible “bricks” of reality constituting every image around us — the paper fibers as substrate of text in a book page, the LED pixels of a video screen composing the image of a painting, the dense organic textures of a leave or human skin. Botanical Ghosts focuses on the death of botanist Dorothy Popenoe in Honduras in 1932 following the ingestion of the fruit of the ackee tree (Blighia Sapida), which was named after Captain Bligh who transported it from Jamaica to England in 1793. The video interweaves vivid shots of the tree with “a collection of letters, documents and images compiled over a period of 2 years” by the artist.
Driven by “the desire to become Other; non-human, trans-human, more-than-human, HSURAE’s Feline Intelligence provokes the viewer with the proposition of an interspecies fecal transplant between the artist and her cat, as a way to get closer to and better understand each other. The piece is based on the finding that flora in our guts affect our behavior and on the medical practice of fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), which was used in China as early as the 4th century with a mixture of feces and saline, or “yellow soup.” Kombucha reveals the marvels and sensuality of bacterial cellulose — obtained through the fermentation of kombucha — aided by an entire set of cellulose whips and lingerie made, worn and handled by HSURAE. In this fire is in the belly of the beast, an electron microscope zooms in and out of fragments of burnt wood and burnt skin, hair, and bacteria, among others, while superimposed text addresses how memory does not only pertain to neurons but also plants and bacteria, and for humans “trying to capture a failing memory becomes an act of self definition.”
In Valladares and HSURAE’s collaborative project Panspermia — a title borrowed from the theory that seeds of life exist all over the universe and travel across it — the artists are seen floating in space in a simulated zero-gravity environment, resembling micro-organisms isolated and observed through a microscope. HSURAE, dressed in a pink “bio-designed flight suit,” proceeds to inhabit a bacterial cellulose sac in a symbiotic union.
3000 Years Among Microbes — a collaborative video work by Valladares, HSURAE and Chi Pohao — speculates on the origins and rebirths of worlds and the life that inhabits them, posing questions regarding “inter-planetary multi-species imaginaries.” Alternating black and white sequences of microscopic views with strikingly similar aerial shots of the artists walking through rocky terrains and other otherworldly locations, one cannot help but wonder what a 3000 year old microbe would have to say and why our presence on Earth is so short-lived.
Valladares and HSURAE will be available for a Q&A following the screening.
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Nancy Dayanne Valladares (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and educator from Tegucigalpa, Honduras currently based in New York. Her image-based practice delves into the formation of optical tools and their accompanying visual regimes. Nancy’s practice closely examines photography’s historical entanglement with botanical imaginaries and chemical legacies.
HSURAE is a predisciplinary (artist, designer, researcher, educator) in the sense that each function is inseparable from the next, bracketed in consideration of the “pre-”. This prefix, the thing that comes before, the prefatory, is pre-reductive, is pre-particulate, is a generative field that they position their work within. Their artistic medium, like their self, is never pure object, never pure subject; ranging from hot glass to fibroblasts, passports to fecal sports. This agential infidelity renders itself visible at the mercy of metaphysics, science and technology studies, posthumanism, food studies, critical race studies and Traditional Chinese Medicine. Hsurae has been shown internationally, including: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, MAXXI Rome, European Cultural Center, TORN theater space, Dubai BAIT15, Taipei Digital Art festival, Medialab Prado, Weisner gallery, Sakiya Palestine, Grand Siecle gallery, Yiri Art Gallery, Olfactory Keller NY amongst others. Artist residencies they’ve taken part in include SymbioticA, hangar.org, MedialabPrado, _V2 institute for the unstable media, Coalesce bioart lab and Urbanglass.