Heather Dewey-Hagborg
Closer Than Your Family
Wei-Ling Gallery, Kuala Lumpur
18 March – 15 April 2023
Wei-Ling Gallery hosts a much anticipated exhibition by the prominent and critically-acclaimed artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg with her exhibition entitled, ‘Closer Than Your Family’, which is her first solo exhibition in Malaysia.
This solo show by artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg features recent works that examine how cutting-edge developments in biotechnology are raising fundamental questions about what it means to be human.
Watson’s Ghost interrogates the interpretation of genetic data, presenting hundreds of interpretations of a single individual’s face based on their DNA. Lovesick presents a custom retrovirus designed to infect humans, irrevocably altering their genomes to make them more loving. Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera transforms research around xenotransplantation – the genetic engineering of pigs to supply human organs–into a musical tribute to the creatures giving their lives for these scientific advances. Finally, Future pigs, plural, builds on the research from Hybrid to present a set of speculative portraits of pigs in the future, if human modification continues along the trajectory of today.
Together these works probe the ways human beings are multitudes, via the subjectivity of interpretation, their genetic mutability, and their increasingly chimeric proximity to non-human animals.
HEATHER DEWEY-HAGBORG (b.1982) is an artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in public places.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg has shown work internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, the Daejeon Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial, and the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, Transmediale, the Walker Center for Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and PS1 MoMA. Her work is held in public collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, SFMoMA, among others, and has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to Art Forum and Wired.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg has a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium, and is an affiliate of Data & Society. She is a founding board member of Digital DNA, a European Research Council funded project investigating the changing relationships between digital technologies, DNA and evidence.
She is also a co-founder and co-curator of REFRESH, an inclusive and politically engaged collaborative platform at the intersection of Art, Science, and Technology.
Exhibition is open by appointment only.
WEI-LING GALLERY
8 Jalan Scott, Brickfields, 50470 Kuala Lumpur
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