A Event

The Mutable Archive Panel + Reception

About

BioBAT Art Space is pleased to host an interdisciplinary panel on "The Mutable Archive", a multi-layered performance video project by Patricia Olynyk, which speaks to the problematics of human archives and renewed nationalistic obsessions with Othering and difference. By interrogating the mechanics of storytelling, the work probes the biological body and its cultural entwinements, the fragility of human life, racial profiling, and gender bias by demonstrating the fictitious foundations of human taxonomy itself.

Olynyk invited collaborators – artists, musicians, scholars, historians, a medical ethicist, a philosopher, an opera singer, and a spiritual medium – to write speculative narratives from an inventory of photographs of human specimens collected by 19th-century Viennese anatomist, Dr. Josef Hyrtl. Each performed script, a 4K cinematic video, exposes the roles of assumption and subjectivity in science.

A wine and cheese reception will follow the panel discussion.

Panel

Artists: Shimon Attie, Ellen K. Levy, and Monika Weiss
Curator and Art Historian: Hannah Klemm
Cultural Historian: Rebecca Messbarger

Moderated by

Artist: Patricia Olynyk