Yani B | Trans:plant

About

In their work, London-based artist Yani B uses different media and materials to interrogate the politics of identity and how it is affecting human bodies.

For this new exhibition, the artist has grown a family of 350 Aloe vera plants, transplanted from the offsets of a single plant over nearly four years.

Yani B’s passion for repetition and process-based art is consistent with their previous work on identity politics, notably ‘A Glimpse Of You’ at the International Print Biennale in Newcastle in 2011, ‘Meta:morphosis’ at the 5th Moscow Biennale in 2013, and ‘Fluid Y’ at the 5th Thessaloniki Biennale in 2015.

For Trans:plant, the punning with the trans- prefix is fully intentional – in asexual reproduction, the ‘parent’ plant produces ‘clones’ of itself. The gender of the plant is not relevant in this process, as flowers are not involved. What’s more, Aloe is monoecious, which means that both male and female flowers exist in the same plant.

The gender identity of the 350 plants does not fit our habitual male-female binary. Their identity is ambiguous. Yani B uses this ambiguity as an opportunity to explore gender as a spectrum, a conscious decision, a fluid state.

The artist will be inviting people to adopt a member of this non-hierarchical family and give them names that challenge the male-female binary. By identifying the subconscious effects of language in reinforcing the gender binary, Yani B believes we are able to create a new, freer mind-set.

Archive Gallery will be hosting the entire family of plants combined with an audiovisual presentation of concepts and data.

For further information and hi-res images contact:

hello@yanib.org

Website

http://www.yanib.org

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