Andreas Greiner: Hybrid Matter

About

For the GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN the Berlin-based artist has produced new works that reflect on how humans manipulate and redesign nature through genetic engineering, speculating on the future of mankind’s own genetic code. Characterizing Andreas Greiners work is his in-depth examination of the dissolving boarders between nature and technology. What is the meaning of nature in an age of digitalization and synthetic biology? How we experience nature is defined by our prior knowledge and socialization, however what we experience in nature is changing rapidly. Human manipulation of evolutionary processes are posing ethical, social and ecologically critical questions which demand answers.

On entering the exhibition space one is welcomed by a nickel-silver sculpture depicting cell division, a reproductive act and conceptual starting point of the exhibition. Sharing the same space, the work Edit Yourself KIT, a DIY Crisper Genome Engineering KIT which would allow one to manipulate your own genetics.

The centrepiece of Greiner‘s exhibition is the soundinstallation The Molecular Ordering of Computational Plants, produced in collaboration with Tyler Friedman who authored the piece’s text and music. This sience fiction audioplay reverberating within the main room of the gallery, composed of a luminicent aquarium and pulsating watertubes synchronised to the soundscape. Along the walls, Greiner presents a new series of photographs showing miscroscopic images of algeas, titled Billions of Heart Beats Slowed Down into Synchronicity, and tumor cells, titled Hybrid Matter Studiesand Panorama of a Landscape, realised with the sientist S. Diller.

„The works at the center of Andreas Greiner’s solo exhibition “Hybrid Matter” constitute an epistemological conundrum. How sure are we of our fundamental convictions of life and death, right and wrong? Hanging in the dimmed exhibition space of Dittrich & Schlechtriem gallery are images of microscopic cellular clusters, magnified between a thousand to ten thousand times: clumps of human intestinal cancer tumor cells and spherical aggregates of Mycoplasma mycoides, the JCVI-syn3.0 strain of a synthetic bacteria created in the J. Craig Venter Institute. Greiner considers these pictures as portraits, like larger-than-life celebratory depictions of individuals that have had an outsized impact on the public sphere. At work in these images, and troubled by them, are the moral and existential implications of portraiture. To represent an individual is to fix their likeness to a moment. From that point on, the individual carries out parallel lives: one propelled into continuous change, the other frozen; one guided by subjectivity, the other by the narrative interpretation of others.“

The excerpt above by Carson Chan will be featured in the exhibition catalogue that will be available in the gallery. For further information to the artist and the works or requests on images please contact Nils Petersen nils(at)dittrich-schlechtriem.com.

Andreas Greiner (b. Aachen, DE / 1979) currently lives and works in Berlin. Greiner studied medicine at the Universität der Bildenden Künste Dresden, then attended The Universität der Künste Berlin in the class of Rebecca Horn and completed in 2013 with the class of Olafur Eliasson. Greiner studied with Eliasson at the Institut für Raumexperimente Berlin  (2009). The artist’s works have ben presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions in national and international institutions. In 2016 he had been awarded with the GASAG Art Prize of the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin  (Agency of the Exponent), and is included in the musuem‘s collection. This April the Kunstverein Heilbronn presents a solo exhibition with new a soundpiece and photographic work. Later this year Greiner‘s 3rd monograph will be published.