Artist
Yu Shuk Pui Bobby
Yu Shuk Pui Bobby (b. 1994) is a visual artist based between Hong Kong and Oslo. With a collaborative approach to her practice, her work conjures the physical, tangible and affective phenomena associated with biotechnology through combinations of video, text, installation, sculpture, and performance. She often uses speculative fiction to tackle questions of human genetic engineering, reconfiguring perceptions of gender, body and historical discourses of identity. Bobby holds a BA from Hong Kong Baptist University and an MFA from Oslo National Academy of Fine Art. Her works have been in Hong Kong, Norway, Japan, China, Iceland and the USA.
Genetic Salon
The Genetic Salon project, developed over the past five years, presents a hypothetical scenario where a genetic beauty company allows consumers to beautify themselves in any way imaginable through genetic technology. Presented in the form of exhibitions, films, speculative fiction and livestream programmes, Genetic Salon is a work of sci-fi, building on queer notions of the fluctuation of body, gender and identity, as well as theories of the digital age and the quantification of everything through big data.
Genetic Salon presents a future worldview in which genes are the basis for dominating everything; it is also the currency in circulation. Gene manipulation paves the way to a more ideal existence, and lends us a chance to experience living as a non-human species. On this technological trajectory towards further artificiality, the notion of the natural has become an enemy.
The project, which began as a podcast with Hong Kong Radio Community, includes collaborators from different professional and personal backgrounds, including artists, filmmakers, scientists, actors, scholars and collectors. It addresses various issues concerning genetic technology in relation to theology, history, anime, and the human body.
The work of Dev Dhunsi is inspired by the migratory movement of his family from South Asia. His photo-installation Ankhon Dekhi (2022) touches upon the complexity of society with its many -scapes (landscape, soundscape, mediascape) and the materiality of his photographic approach spans different media from textile to sculptural installation. As a subject with a complex historiography and layered diasporic knowledge, he focuses on the sociological character of photography.
Paulina Tamara's commitment to photography as a means of representation is manifold. Her work comprises longstanding work with youth, exploring what they're coming to know in expressing their sexuality and gender freely. In Undress, looking at a queer woman undressing (2021), Tamara invited 15 people to watch her undressing while took pictures of the session with a trigger – an exercise in looking when both taking and giving complete control over the image.
Naina Helén Jåma is a photographer working for influential Norwegian newspapers and magazines. She started her career as a South Sámi mediator in Jåhkåmåhkke at the Ájtte Museum at 13, and continues to maintain a close relationship with traditional Sámi arts. In her project Vætnoe (2018–), Jåma speaks about traditional forms in living matter in Sámi people's livelihood, and how these forms and shapes continue to be part of the technological availability of today.
Ilavenil Vasuky Jayapalan is a dissenting multidisciplinary artist. As a child of the Tamil Tigers ,and the subject of echoes of the traumatic effects of civil war, he ponders a postcolonial take on propaganda. Among the works Jayapalan has shared for FUTURES is Hello freeends 4.1 (2022), a self-portrait crafted through AI manipulation, based on what a South Asian person looks like to a machine when fed bits of information.
Bobby Yu Shuk Pui grounds her work in the queer and genderless exploration of body politics, with a critical perspective on the social norms and constructs dictating reproduction and beautification – pushed to the forefront of the capitalist agenda in Asia, where Pui began her work. In the ongoing Genetic Salon (2020–), Put presents a web of video clips, exhibitions, and other material, leading the audience into a seductive imagination of the future.