Johanna Bruckner

MOLECULAR SEX

The future is often described as a toxic breakdown of the human. For Johanna Bruckner, the hybridization of the nonhuman and human is rather a starting point for the indeterminacy of being.

Her video installation, Molecular Sex, shows an entanglement of human, animal, technology, sex, and atmosphere in which molecularization shapes a networked world. The fluid main character is a fictitious sex bot that evokes plastic as a chemical substance impacting biological life; it further performs as a brittle star (a sea creature) as well as nanotechnological beings that distort lovemaking and gender. Pushing the limits of the human sensorium, it invents technological prostheses that redistribute the relations and patterns with which subjects comprehend the world. The project asks how the molecularization and indeterminacy of being, today, might inform futures better tooled to deal with current technological, political and ecological changes.

Johanna Bruckner (Vienna, 1984) is based in Zurich. Her recent research shows an entanglement of human, animal, technology, sex, and atmosphere in which molecularization shapes a networked world. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt, ICA, Institute for Contemporary Art, Milan; Roehrs & Boetsch, Zürich; The Transmediale 2020, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; The 57th Venice Biennial; Galerie EIGEN+ART Lab, Berlin; CAC, Centre; The Architecture Venice Biennale 2018; KW, Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Migros Musem für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; Villa Croce, Museum for Contemporary Art, Genoa; the Kunsthaus in Hamburg; the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof; Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich. Her work was arwarded by numerous awards and was nominated for a fellowship at Harvard University, MIT, Cambridge. She was a Visual Arts Fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Rom, the Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Banff Center for Visual Arts in Canada and is currently a fellow at the Jan Van Eyck Academie. Bruckner is working on a commission for Mediterranea Biennale for Young Art and Swissnex San Francisco and received the Recognition Award for Fine Arts of Lower Austria, 2020.

PHOTO CAPTION: Johanna Bruckner, Molecular Sex, 4K/HD video, still, 2020

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