Starfish EXTENDED : Muse Ex Machina- Biomechanics Exhibition
Extended edit of my article for Starfish Magazine
Muse Ex Machina’s Biomechanics art exhibition, curated by Rucha Benare, took place over the course of three days in Hen’s Teeth, Blackpitts, Dublin 8. Upon entering I had the aim of the exhibition explained to me by Rucha; “I want you to be able to answer what biomechanics is by looking at the works and making your way through the exhibition”.
The way the exhibition aimed to do this was through collaborative work between artists and scientists which produced an incredible range of art. This included sculpture, painting, interactive installation pieces, poetry and audio work.
I asked Rucha how she navigated exhibition curation after coming from a science background. Rucha: “ I decided that I needed to just let people be themselves… my responsibility is connecting the dots for them”.
Rucha: “I want the curation to be almost like a physical and mental exercise, you have to take the time to work through the exhibition to understand the real beauties”
A work that exemplified this ethos towards curation was Valentina Nojarov’s Metamorphosis. This work takes research plotting the curvature of a woman’s spine during different stages of pregnancy and places it low on the wall, making the viewer bend their backs to see it properly. This cleverly makes us literally embody the feeling of the work, hunched over reading the research that it was born from.
Other outstanding works include:
Sheila Verseck’s The Bend- This piece is the one which immediately confronts you when entering the exhibition. It intertwines ideas of classical beauty with the effects of osteoporosis. This combination results in a contorted clay, feminine torso which is both elegantly beautiful and also shows the visceral effects of a body’s morphing from the bone disease.
Emre Ertugrul’s Ayak- This audio work invites viewers to listen through headphones connected to a tablet left simply on a plinth in the exhibition space. The piece draws comparisons with Turkish music and how it is imperfect and microtonal to the asymmetrical gait of a person walking.
Diana Ferro’s The Complexity of the Environment is Missing in Vitro- In this piece Diana Ferro presents Rucha Benare’s research regarding growing bone cultures and purposefully misunderstands it through meaning shifts of the word “culture” to its other more anthropological meaning. This results in an emotional and intuitive reading of the scientific process which is rarely seen and changed how I saw the rest of the exhibition. This new practice of thinking of double meanings of words and then applying them to the other works to find other, human and emotional values, really heightened the exhibition for me.
This sort of collaboration is important and interesting for the same reason, it’s rarely done yet works so well. It is a holistic and well rounded way of viewing the world through both science and art. These often are very separated fields yet they respond to the same experience of living in our world.
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