Sensing as Research: Artist Talk with Anicka Yi

Artist Talk with Anicka Yi
Response by Mel Y. Chen (Gender & Women’s Studies)
Thursday, January 25 at 5:30 pm
Maude Fife Room, 3rd Floor, Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley

Artist Anicka Yi will talk about her work and artistic practice as it relates to synthetic biology, bio engineering, extinction, and bio fiction. Using her 2016 Guggenheim Museum Hugo Boss Prize exhibition “Life Is Cheap” as a case study for her talk, she will examine her concept of “biopolitics of the senses,” or how assumptions and anxieties related to gender, race, and class shape physical perception.

Anicka Yi lives and works in New York City. Recent institutional solo exhibitions of her work include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel; Kunsthalle Basel; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Kitchen, New York; and The Cleveland Museum of Art. In 2016, she was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize. Yi has screened her film, The Flavor Genome, at the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, 2017. She is represented by 47 Canal, New York.

Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures. Mel’s research and teaching interests include queer and gender theory, animal studies, critical race theory, Asian American studies, disability studies, science studies, and critical linguistics. Mel’s book Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke UP 2012, Alan Bray Memorial Award), explores questions of racialization, queering, disability, and affective economies in animate and inanimate “life.”