Patricia Piccinini is an artist who explores the frontiers of science and technology through her sculpture, photographs and video environments. Since the early 1990s, Piccinini has pursued an interest in the human form and its potential for manipulation and enhancement through bio-technological intervention. From the mapping of the human genome to the growth of human tissue and organs from stem cells, Piccinini’s art charts a terrain in which scientific progress and ethical questions are intertwined.
Ideas about nature and its simulation are central to Piccinini’s works, inviting us to question what is ‘real’ and what is not. Contemporary advertising and the culture of consumerism also finds recurrent expression in Piccinini’s art practice. Personal identity and the issues surrounding it lie at the core of Piccinini’s project. Her works invite the question: what is it that makes us who we are? For if the body can be unmade and remade through technology, what implications does this have for our identity as human beings? At this very moment, television reports about the insertion of surrogate pig organs into ailing human bodies have sparked debate about the nature of identity and it potential contamination. The benefits and drawbacks of gene therapy as a cure for illness, of genetically modified crops and their improved disease resistance, of cloning and it possibilities for infertility, and of stem cell research with its vast medical potential: each development shifts us further away from an imagined original or ‘essential’ self, and makes equally problematic our past definitions of the natural.
Exhibition organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia. The MCA acknowledges financial support from the NSW Ministry for the Arts and annual grant funding from the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its' arts funding and advisory body
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