Patricia Piccinini: Inter-natural

In her second solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery, Patricia Piccinini presents an immersive installation of hyper-realistic sculptures probing the increasingly permeable boundaries of humanness.

For more than two decades, Piccinini has explored the potentialities—both liberating and threatening—inherent in our advancing capabilities in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Her meticulously-crafted sculptures envision a co-mingling of animal, plant, machine and human, questioning the ‘otherness’ of creatures, cyber-forms, and humans who don’t resemble ‘the norm.’ These imagined beings are nearly possible, embodying and reflecting the complex ethical issues of our times.

Connection and empathy are at the heart of Piccinini’s practice. The creatures she envisions share a deep emotional bond in a trans-species, posthuman version of love and relational ethics. In her catalog essay for Piccinini’s enormous survey exhibition, Curious Affection, at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Rosi Braidotti states, “We need to rethink the human, the non-human, the inhuman, the trans- and post-human in an era defined both as the fourth industrial revolution and the sixth extinction… Piccinini challenges us to review our preconceived ideas and socially enforced relationships with the otherwise embodied.”

Patricia Piccinini was born in Sierra Leone in 1965 and currently resides in Melbourne. She was chosen to represent Australia in the 2003 Venice Biennale and her work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions worldwide. This year the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane presented a major solo exhibition of her work, and her 2016 solo museum exhibition in Brazil had the second highest attendance record of any global exhibition that year.