Goldin+Senneby: Insurgency of Life

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Insurgency of Life draws on bodily experiences of living with an autoimmune condition and what that has meant for the artists’ joint subjectivity.

A “fountain of youth” in which immune-suppressing fungi grow on nutritional agar forms the centerpiece for thinking about networks of care and extraction, both between humans and other organisms. The Isaria sinclairii fungus has long been used in traditional Chinese medicine as an elixir of youth, and more recently, its active substance has been used in the development of drugs to treat MS. The fungal fountain is surrounded by ten Lego robots, which carry smartphones with a pedometer app. The robots manipulate the step counts, acting as decoys to data-hungry insurance companies that want to monitor people’s activity. The installation is accompanied by an X-ray image of a fungi-infested cicada (the insect that this fungus colonizes in order to propagate in nature), and a series of layered illustrations, Notes on a Condition, which symbolically depict the processes of nurture and extraction at work.

In parallel the artists will present the project Spruce Time, an attempt at cloning the world’s oldest tree – a 10,000-year-old fir from rural Sweden. A series of photographs show different grafts from the ancient spruce; on the reverse side of each is an option certificate, which grants the owner the opportunity to become the future caretaker of the pictured clone, should it survive. In 2025, one of the specimens will take root in a new hospital in Malmö as a living public artwork.

The artists will also premiere a new series of paintings, exploring the origins of biological immunity, with an accompanying artist talk, Starfish and Citrus Thorn, to be performed at the opening.