PREMIERE: ONLINE STREAM
Fri 28 May 2021
20:15 BST (45 mins)
Includes a 15 minute reading / listening requirement at the start - details below.
18+

For an optimal listening experience, please wear headphones.

ACCESS: BSL | CC
This performance will be captioned. This performance will also be British Sign Language Interpreted by Bea Webster.

A speculative, biohacked performance of multispecies IVF.

In this work, Picatrix-AI recalls the veiled spectacle of contemporary xenotransplantation, as it ellipses the longstanding, racialising and imperialist histories of medical experimentation and enslaved gestational labour. Through a reframing of mythological genealogy and embodiment of the Chimera-as-scientist, this performance of biohacked multispecies IVF presents the ethical predicaments within the socio-technological drive towards a hierarchical and designed auto-gestation of the human species.

The performance responds to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s interventions that demonstrate the categories of “race” and “species” as mutually reinforcing terms in Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World.

READING/LISTENING REQUIREMENT: An extract of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson will be posted here and in the Festival Hub in May, as a PDF and an audio recording. Although this can be read by audiences in their own time in the run up to the performance, the artist also invites attendees to read or listen to the extract at 815pm before the performance begins at 8.30pm on Fri 28 May.

Picatrix-AI is a modular group led in this iteration by Soojin Chang.

Sound Design: J.E. Battah
Producer: Claricia Parinussa

A TRAMWAY COMMISSION

Soojin Chang (b. 1991, California) is an interdisciplinary artist engaged in using performance as research to call forth a multispecies commune. Chang has exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York), ICA London, CCA Glasgow, Microscope Gallery (New York), Sa Sa Art Projects (Phnom Penh) and Addis Video Art Festival (Addis Ababa). Read an interview with Soojin Chang here.

www.soojinchang.com