Membranes Out Of Order (MOOO) was a year-long research project that culminated in an exhibition held at Kunstquartier Bethanien Berlin from December 2022 to January 2023. MOOO responded to ethical and cultural challenges posed by the interplay of biotechnology and ecology and traced a trajectory through our poetics and provocations by featuring our recent and previous works. Artworks of more extensive production were placed in dialogue with pieces that were realised with simple resources, experimental materials, and prototypes to highlight the core themes of our practices. What emerged was a landscape of micro- and macro-ecologies where common understandings of life and death were scrutinised. Intertwined, all the exhibited objects revealed and discussed more-than-human embodiments, vulnerabilities, and taboos.

In the project, membranes – cellular membranes, microbial cellulose, skin, bodies, and parafilm – were both an artistic material and a metaphor, a layer that separates while allowing exchange. […] The exhibition was arranged across rooms where membranes merged and were inseparable as part of the exhibition architecture, while in others they were embedded in our works as sites of multispecies encounters or were dissected and meticulously examined. [..]

Alongside full-fledged (though sometimes revamped) artworks, MOOO made room for items rarely presented to the audience by putting on display research materials, such as sketches and lab journals, and laboratory equipment: used Petri dishes, vials with dead cells, and microscopic slides. There were also our drawings and a selection from our publications, some of our failed experiments, and various specimens we had collected. These materials and artefacts revealed how much labour must be done before an artwork takes its final shape. Showing them also tied in with the idea of art as a process that is not capped in and by the exhibited piece, but rather entails an excess, a recalcitrance against being contained in the final artwork. Such a constellation of materials and artworks shows hypotheses, potentialities, failures, and ramifications. (Excerpt from: Membranes Out of Order, ed. by Pevere, M, T Schubert, K Żyniewicz. Berlin: Membranes GbR 2023).

The exhibition features a reader with texts by the three artists, philosopher Margrit Shildrick and art critic Olga Majcen Linn. If you wish to order a copy, please drop me a line

As a non-disabled practitioner in fields where ideas of critical embodiment are central, we are aware how our fields suffer from a contradiction: they lack the voice of disabled practitioners and their meaningful direct experience. This philosophical and ethical reflection spurred us to develop a custom program of accessibility for blind and visually imparied audiences in collaboration with the Deutscher Blinden- und Sehbehindertenverband e.V. (DBSV; German Federation of the Blind and Partially Sighted).