Anicka Yi: Metaspore

Curated by Fiammetta Griccioli and Vicente Todolí.

Pirelli HangarBicocca presents Metaspore, the most comprehensive exhibition ever realized devoted to Anicka Yi (Seoul, 1971; lives and works in New York). The artist emerged as one of the most radical figures on the art scene during the late 2000s, working on themes that lie between art and science.

Featuring more than 20 installations from 2010 until today, the show at Pirelli HangarBicocca, conceived as a sensory and synesthetic experience, questions the boundaries between natural and synthetic, human and non-human, materiality and immateriality. Yi’s work generates narratives that combine philosophical questions with sci-fi imagery, and creates connections between biology and literature, life and storytelling, taking an approach defined as “bio-fiction.”

Curated by Fiammetta Griccioli and Vicente Todolí, Metaspore explores Anicka Yi’s work over the last decade characterized by the use of perishable and industrial materials in assemblages that defy the immutable nature of sculpture and installation.

The title—a neologism coined by Anicka Yi by juxtaposing the prefix “meta” to “spore”—metaphorically evokes the process of proliferation that the artist employs in her work, which contaminates and is contaminated by its surroundings. Metaspore has thus been conceived as a survey of Yi’s most iconic works and follows a multisensory and immersive path, centered on the one hand on the olfactory dimension—with a series of works that feature fragrances—and, on the other, on the dynamics of the transformation of matter, such as corrosion and metabolic processes. For the occasion, the artist and her studio collaborated with the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Milano-Bicocca University to create an expanded and updated version of Biologizing the Machine (terra incognita), originally presented at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.

Commissioned and produced for Pirelli HangarBicocca, the new work, titled Biologizing the Machine (spillover zoonotica), 2022, is composed by seven large glass display cases housing a Winogradsky culture (named after the Russian microbiologist who invented this device for the development of microorganisms), a locally created ecosystem combining soil bacteria, cyanobacteria and algae. Through cycles of growth, stasis, and decay, the installation reacts to the surrounding environment: the organisms take different colors, generating “suspended paintings” that alter during the exhibition period.

By combining works that probe the idea of embodiment along with others focused on the hybridization of living beings and machines, Metaspore reveals essential themes in Yi’s practice, such as the co-existence of different organisms, nonhuman forms of intelligence, identity and social injustice.

The catalogue
Metaspore is accompanied by the most comprehensive monograph on the artist, published by Pirelli HangarBicocca with Marsilio Editori. It includes contributions by the art historian Giovanni Aloi, the professor of English and gender studies Rachel Lee, and a conversation between the author and biologist Merlin Sheldrake and Anicka Yi, together with a text by the project’s curators. The publication also contains detailed entries on the exhibited works, the complete visual chronology of Yi’s solo exhibitions, and a glossary of her most relevant conceptual references, specially conceived with the artist

The exhibition program
Metaspore is part of the 2022–23 exhibition program conceived by Artistic Director Vicente Todolí and the curatorial department. The program will continue in the Navate with exhibitions by Steve McQueen (March 31–July 31, 2022); Bruce Nauman (September 15, 2022–February 26, 2023); Ann Veronica Janssens (April 6–July 30, 2023); and James Lee Byars (October 2023–March 2024). In the Shed: Dineo Seshee Bopape (October 6, 2022–January 29, 2023); Gian Maria Tosatti (February 23–July 16, 2023); and Thao Nguyen Phan (September 2023–February 2024).