Curious Minds: ArtScience Monthly #18

About

On September 21, we’ll navigate material expressions of watery environments through membrane structures, molecular flows of exchange, and phenomenological transformation. Membranes are permeable structures open to a multiplicity of interactions. The event explores a membrane methodology to facilitate a porous exchange between artistic practices and scientific knowledge.

We’ll have the pleasure of being joined by Dominique Savitri Bonarjee and Swati Aggarwal. Dominique Savitri Bonarjee is a visual artist and doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths University of London, whose work centres around liquid choreographies, embodiment practices, spiritual traditions, and the production of knowledge. Swati Aggarwal is a structural biologist working with ESS’s Neutron Instrument Division to extract and convert membrane proteins into crystals in order to understand the basic biological functioning of the human body or plants.

This event has been curated by our Curious Mind members Ashley Middleton and Georgia Perkins. Through their combined interests into aquatic and quantum ecologies, Ashley and Georgia have collaborated on multiple projects including the virtual residency ‘The Body in Algorithms’.

~

ABOUT THE ARTSCIENCE MONTHLY

Every third Tuesday of the month, we invite you to join in these open and informal evenings, where we create playful situations for interactions with other participants. We share thoughts, practice open-mindedness and create new bonds, while imagining alternative futures by crossing perspectives beyond disciplinary boundaries. Besides, each session starts with impulse talks by an artist and a scientist; just enough to get inspired and start off an exchange!

These events are organized by STATE Studio in the framework of Curious Minds: a community program that aims to explore new forms of collective thinking, learning and acting at the intersection of art and science.

STATE is a Berlin-based art-science initiative with the mission to create opportunities for cross-sectoral encounters and interdisciplinary creativity. Through its exhibitions and open program, it offers curated deep-dives into current trends in science, society and innovation and creates a platform for collaboration between artists, scientists and curious others.

~

PROGRAM ON September 21

19:00 Introduction

19:15 Inspiration Talks by Dominique Savitri Bonarjee and Swati Aggarwal

19:45 Interactive Sessions in Breakout Rooms

20:30 Collective Exchange and Q&A's

21:00 End of the evening

~

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

- ashley middleton (b. 1985, USA) is an independent curator and visual artist, working in a range of media that includes photography, sculpture, and installation. Her projects are an expression of her ongoing research into the unconscious, its manifestation in human behavior, and how those behaviors produce, and alter, our physical and digital worlds. Her practice contemplates the notion of the self as a microcosm of the cosmos and the evolution of social connectivity in the age of rapid technological advancement. Middleton’s work uses philosophy, science, and empirical research to address the value of the body and its symbiotic relation to nature. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally.

- Georgia Perkins (b.1996, UK) is a PhD researcher in the Visual Cultures Department at Goldsmiths University of London. Her work critically examines the subatomic scale, questions of indeterminacy and the sensible. She is a curatorial fellow at Sirius Art Centre, a core member of the Liquidity Cohort and Counterfield Collective, and currently has residencies with Zero Corners and Exposed Arts Projects. Perkins has previously published an E-Flux reader on Dizziness, and given papers at the conferences ‘Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions’ for the LSFRC research group in September 2020, and the ‘Indeterminate Futures/Futures of Indeterminacy’ at the University of Dundee in November 2020.

- Dominique Savitri Bonarjee is a French-Indian artist with ties to many places and cultures. She interweaves live art with diverse media to create rhythmic compositions that transmit the fluidity of her life experience. Her art practice invites metamorphic interactions with materials and nonhuman agents through ritual and ceremony. By creating ‘liquid choreographies’ she dreams of dissolving institutional walls. She regularly collaborates with other artists, notably recent projects with Taiwanese artist Chaong-Wen Ting for Weimar Kunstfest (2021), and with author Astrida Neimanis for Lofoten International Arts Festival (2019). She has shown work internationally. Her current doctoral project in the Art Department at Goldsmiths University of London, proposes ‘practices of knowing’ as an embodied methodology inspired by the Eastern spiritual traditions of non-duality.

- Swati Aggarwal is a membrane protein biochemist currently working at ESS, Sweden. Her major research interest is to design a methodology to grow large crystals of membrane and cytoplasmic proteins. To do so, she extracts proteins from bacterias, animals or even plants in the form of a solution. This solution is then converted into the form of beautiful crystals (just like snow or salt crystals).

Since these protein molecules are way too small to be observed by a microscope, she uses radiation of X-rays or neutrons to study the structure of proteins. This study helps scientists to design a drug against proteins that are involved in causing a disease or understand the basic functioning of the human body and plants.

Apart from science she is also deeply engaged in various science communication activities for ESS and EU-Horizon. According to her, “Communicating science beyond the academic bubble is very important to build public understanding of health and environmental issues.” Thus, she depicts her complex science projects in the form of art to increase the awareness about wonderful scientific discoveries. She is working on different modes of communication to narrow the bridge between the fascinating ‘science world’ and the general public.