Metaspore is a nomadic research initiative aimed to foster interdisciplinary “spores” of collective action amidst 21st-century paradigm shifts. Utilizing Anicka Yi's practice as a guiding philosophy, Metaspore sculpts regenerative spaces, multi-sensorial experiences, visionary conversations, and art-science partnerships that resist predetermined outcomes and fixed identities.

In order to foster urgent dialogue between the arts and sciences, in collaboration with Stanford University, Metaspore will be hosting a full day of visionary conversations, embodied performances, and community activities. Through this event we aim to move beyond mere knowledge production, choosing instead to be fully present together, invite meaningful connections, and shift away from conventional thinking towards radical breakthroughs. This inaugural Metaspore Symposium will mark the culmination of Yi's year-long residency through Stanford Arts, where she explored Metaspore’s research areas along with a group of student fellows in her spring course, Metaspore: The Networked Sensorium.

Co-taught with Stanford arts faculty Miguel Novelo, the course explored strategies for addressing significant planetary changes by strengthening our connection to our senses and questioning our previous conditioning, which prioritized knowledge over our well-being. We sought to understand the sensory worlds of both human and multispecies “others” by breaking out of our disciplinary silos of expertise towards a more holistic awareness of planetary becoming.

To further this line of questioning and experimentation, the Metaspore Symposium 2023 will bring together an interdisciplinary constellation of speakers including:

September 25, 2023 –July 31, 2024. This year-long research season uses the work of the artist Anicka Yi as a lens to think about our contemporary moment. A series of open questions map out a broad thematic territory for a year-long schedule of public programs: reading groups, lectures, performances, screenings, and other events explore artists and ideas that emerge as related or as relevant in productive ways. We end the season with an issue of our annual reader.

• ‍September 27, curator Lumi Tan, who organized our solo exhibition at the Kitchen in New York in 2015, gives a lecture focused on language in the artist's work.
• ‍October 26, A conversation with poet Cathy Park Hong.
• ‍November 9 The Wattis presents a screening of Ho Tzu Nyen's CDOSEA (The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia).

Esther Schipper is delighted to announce the representation of Anicka Yi.

Feel the pulse of the next generation of creative projects and enterprises at a new festival created by NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art, design, and technology.

Open to the public, DEMO2023 will take place over three days at the New Museum and feature talks, showcases, and performances, with additional hosted events and programs at partner locations across lower Manhattan.

Teaser for the “Bodies of Knowledge” episode from Season 11 of the Art in the Twenty-First Century series, featuring the work and processes of Guerrilla Girls, Anicka Yi, Tauba Auerbach, and Hank Willis Thomas.

Join Picador and the Gladstone Gallery as we celebrate The Dawn of Everything's long-awaited paperback release, with David Wengrow and conceptual artist Anicka Yi.

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Sophia Roosth, an anthropologist, will present a primer on sperm shopping. She’ll guide the audience through one of the popular online cryobanks that entice subscribers with detailed donor profiles and stock photos of happy (typically white, straight) families. As she browses, Roosth will speak with Anicka Yi, an artist, about the role of eugenics in shaping our biotech-fueled “procreative fantasies,” drawing on her Triple Canopy essay on her own effort to reconcile “e-cummerce” and queer family-making. Roosth will also consult with guests who are searching for the right donors (or gametes).

The Postnatal Egg: Heliconius, Archaic Cusp, Memory Sleeper Cell, Sunspool, Volcanic Endpoint, Releasing the Human from the Human now welcomes guests to Newfields. The sculpture is made up of eight lacquered kelp pods suspended inside the Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion that resemble cocoon-like structures. Each kelp pod is internally lit and gives off a subtle amber glow. Look closely and you will see animatronic insects flutter about inside each pod.

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The artist’s search may be recursive, with no attainable ends, yet produce objects, events, and movements with the capacity to touch anyone who encounters them in unforeseeable ways.  What light does this shine on conventional scholarly/scientific spirals of research-and-publication at an institution like Stanford?  What alternative rhythms of seeking and creating can we discern?

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In Anicka Yi’s work, vegetal cocoons give birth to robotic insects, blurring the line between the natural and the artificial, as with Donna Haraway’s cyborg, in which all the dualisms of modernity are cancelled out in order to better embrace the porosities between beings and identities.

Anicka Yi has been thinking about death—about how, when her “biological body ceases to function,” she might be able to continue her practice. But even in her imagined death, she imagines life, speculating on the possibility of contributing without consciousness, letting the parts of the body that continue to evolve after death lead the creative process.

"Anicka Yi’s paintings immediately hit with the uncanny sensation of looking at biological specimens housed within glass slides as viewed under a microscope. That the works are quite large only adds to their topsy-turvy effect. They draw you in to look closely, giving a three-dimensional sense of depth with areas of focus and blur through seemingly transparent passages and layers." — John Vincler

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Anicka Yi. This presentation marks the artist’s first show with the Gallery in New York and in the city in nearly a decade. Borne from the artist’s early experiments with painting, in which the artist created canvas-like configurations with glycerin soap and various found materials, the works in this exhibition continue upon Yi’s exploration of imagemaking through an implementation of inventive approaches. Depicting both recognizable and abstracted forms, such as painterly brushstrokes and washes of color, to blood cells and fish eggs, scratched and ruptured skin, polyps and crustaceans, and the undulations of a deep ocean floor, these textural and sculptural compositions demonstrate the artist’s imaginative ability to depict forms in space. Working beyond the confines of two dimensions, these works interrogate painting’s mythical associations with individual authorship and the physical body and human agency of the painter.

Anicka Yi
Begin Where You Are Gladstone Seoul May 31 – July 8, 2022

Reflecting on the past few years, we ask, “What does it mean to reset in times such as these? What of the past are we leaving behind, and what new paths of becoming are opening before us?” While withholding any clear answer, our characteristic biomorphic and “techno-sensual” aesthetics blend aspects of synthetic and industrial life with entropy, sensuality, and abjection, all infused with a bright and playful palette that hints toward the stubborn resilience of life, even amidst global cataclysm.

Featuring more than twenty 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.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition, this catalog is the most extended monograph of Anicka Yi studio work to date.

The volume presents critical essays by Giovanni Aloi, art historian specializing in representations of nature, and Rachel C. Lee, professor of English literature and gender studies, along with a conversation between me and Merlin Sheldrake, biologist and writer, and two contributions by the exhibition curators. It includes an original “cosmology” conceived in collaboration with my studio: a glossary of our most significant fictional, scientific, and philosophical references. In-depth photographic documentation of the “Metaspore” show is complimented by a complete exhibition chronology, together with detailed written entries about the works on display at @pirelli_hangarbicocca.

Graphic design: @leftloft.design
Metaspore curators: @fiammetta.griccioli #vicentetodoli
#metaspore

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For the 2021 Hyundai Commission, asked herself what a ‘natural history of machines’ could look and feel like. As well as a revealing conversation with the artist about her own thinking, this book features a series of questions posed by her to some of the most ingenious minds now working in the diverse disciplines encompassed in her highly experimental work.

Taking cues from soft robotics and the natural world, conceptual artist Anicka Yi builds lighter-than-air machines that roam and react like autonomous life forms. Her floating "aerobes" inspire us to think about new ways of living with machines -- and to ponder how they could evolve into living creatures. "What if our machines could be more than just our tools, and instead, a new type of companion species?" she asks.