Thursday, October 24, 2024
10.00 Plenary Speaker
Jens HAUSER. Art and the Holobiont: Microperformative Positions Beyond the ‘Individual/Collective’ Binary
How does the concept of the holobiont, proposed by biologist Lynn Margulis since 1991, profoundly inspire performative artistic practices, by opening up a contemporary perspective on life as a co-operative and holistic phenomenon based on complex relationships between living and non-living entities? The notion fosters trans-disciplinary discussions in art, philosophy and the techno-sciences in order to destabilize and blur the boundaries between self and other, biological and technological realms, hence contributing to shifting discourses from ‘identity’, ‘individuality, or ‘difference’ to ‘cohabitation’ and ‘entanglement’. Based on the contributions to the forthcoming book Lifve is Other: A/Biotic Entanglements in Art and Curating (De Gruyter, 2024, edited by Thomas Feuerstein, Jens Hauser and Lucie Strecker), the fluidity of lifve across various scales appears through the lens of the holobiont – from microscopic organisms to planetary systems, demonstrating how art can reveal the deep interconnectedness within a holistic and evolutionary perspective, and relate the invisibility of the microscopic to the incomprehensibility of the macroscopic.
Jens Hauser is a Paris based media studies scholar, writer and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology. He has recently been a Professor in Art History at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and currently is a researcher at University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion, as well as a distinguished faculty member of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, where he co-directs the BRIDGE artist in residency program. At the intersection of art history and epistemology, he developed a theory of biomediality as part of his doctorate at Ruhr-University Bochum. He also holds a degree in scientific journalism from the Université François Rabelais Tours. As a curator, he has organised around 30 international exhibitions and festivals.