Refolding (Laboratory Architectures)

Kira O'Reilly and Jennifer Willet

What Next for the Body? Exhibition at Arnolfini Museum Bristol, UK
Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue
2010

Using performative interventions and photographic media, artists Kira O'Reilly (Ireland/Finland) and Jennifer Willet (Canada) collaborate to create eventful photographic presences that explore how we think and reconceptualise The Body, our own bodies, life and living systems within the ever changing contexts of the Life Sciences, evolving biotechnologies and biomedical research.

Both artists have spent substantial time working with living biological materials in laboratories as art practice; in these new works they deploy architectural constructions of mutating laboratory coats that perform molecular baroque refoldings with which to position their bodies in the laboratory, both implicit and complicit as interlopers, instigators and participants within the lab.

Photographs by Hugo Glendinning Laboratory coat construction by Shanti Freed.

This work was produced with the support of the Inbetween Time festival (IBT 2010),School ofBiosciences, University of Birmingham, and the Social Sciences and Humanities ResearchCouncil of Canada.
http://www.inbetweentime.co.uk/events/detail/what_next_for_the_body_-_exhibition/

This work was exhibited also at Noxious Sector Projects in Seattle Washington in January 2012.
http://www.noxioussector.net/nsp/201201/

In 2012 Willet and O’Reilly reworked the images digitally into a new series called Refolding (Laboratory ArchitectureTwins).

Image Credits:
01-03
Kira O’Reilly and Jennifer Willet
Refolding (Laboratory Architectures)
Arnolfini Museum, Bristol UK
2010
Photo Credit:Hugo Glendinning

04-05
Kira O’Reilly and Jennifer Willet
Refolding (Laboratory ArchitectureTwins)
2012