[rohrpost] Suzanne Anker featured on the Archive of Digital Art (ADA)

[Image.Science at donau-uni.ac.at]

New Artist Feature on the Archive of Digital Art (ADA)



Suzanne Anker
calling attention to the beauty of life and the necessity for enlightened thinking about nature’s ‘tangled bank’


But even above Anker’s address to technology, what we come away with most from her work is a profound sense of biophilia: the innate impulse of living things to connect with all life. In a time when our estrangement from nature has made us agents of our own destruction, our recovery of that impulse may be a matter of our very survival.

Taney Roniger, Strata-Suzanne Anker and Frank Gillette, The Brooklyn Rail<https://brooklynrail.org/2019/05/artseen/Strata-Suzanne-Anker-and-Frank-Gillette>



The Archive of Digital Art features the Bio Art pioneer, visual artist and theorist Suzanne Anker (US) to honor her widely interdisciplinary work in the field of art, technology and biological sciences. In her artist profile on ADA a representative selection of 10 works of her oeuvre, which draw connections to Digital Art, are documented and presented.



Combining various activities besides creating art, such as teaching, public speaking, writing and research, Anker’s practice investigates the ways in which nature is being altered in the 21st century. Concerned with genetics, climate change, species extinction and toxic degradation, she frequently works with “pre-defined and found materials” such as botanical and geological specimens, sometimes combined, processed or enhanced with material and techniques such as medical museum artifacts, laboratory apparatuses, microscopic images and 3D printing. She works in a variety of mediums ranging from animation and large-scale photography to digital sculpture and large-scale installations.



Suzanne’s scientific, research driven and thoroughly designed work wants to show the spectators the beauty of life itself, but at the same time it is juxtaposed to the critical views on the historical and technological developments in the Anthropocene - and calls attention to the “necessity for enlightened thinking about nature’s ‘tangled bank’”.



Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries, including the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institute, the Phillips Collection, P.S.1 Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Japan, the Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité in Berlin, the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, and V Art Center in Shanghai, China.


Read the full feature article and interview here:

Suzanne Anker, Artist Feature, 2021
<https://www.digitalartarchive.at/features/featured-artists/featured-artist-suzanne-anker.html>Check out Suzanne Anker´s profile on ADA<https://www.digitalartarchive.at/database/artists/general/artist/anker.html>


Text and Interview (CC) by Carla Zamora
December 2021