When: Wednesday November 9th, 2011 (4:15-5:30pm)
Speaker: Dehlia Hannah
Dehlia Hannah explores contemporary practices of genetic portraiture by artists including Kevin Clarke, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Gary Schneider, Marc Quinn and Andre Brodyk, whose work is presently on view at the Multispecies Salon. Attending to the way that each artist samples and processes DNA fragments and deploys them visually, she reads molecular genetics as a new medium that asserts its own distinctive representational claims within and against the tradition of portrait photography. Even as it usurps the photograph’s claim to index the real, genetic portraiture re-stages the portrait genre’s perennial concern with the representation of human identity in medium that calls this notion fundamentally into question. As technological and imaginative experiments in self-fashioning, genetic portraits expand the genre’s temporal horizon to comprehend our kinship with distant human and non-human ancestors and the uncertain futures augured by diagnostic assays.
Dehlia Hannah: Official Website
