2017-2018 Rapaport Lecture in Contemporary Art: Anicka Yi
Wednesday, November 29, 2017, 4:30 p.m.
Pruyne Lecture Hall, 115 Fayerweather
Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts
"When Anicka Yi won the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize, an award of $100,000 paired with a solo exhibition at the museum that confers it, art lovers familiar with her heady synthesis of sculpture, biography and biotech wondered what sights – and smells – might await them.
Ms. Yi collaborates with biologists, forensic scientists and perfumers to make art that tests the boundaries of perception and personal hygiene. She has injected snails with the human bonding hormone oxytocin, attempted to bottle the rarefied scent of a blue-chip megagallery and cultivated a feminist “collective bacteria” based on samples from women in the art world. Although her work can be visually seductive, she often asks us to approach art nose-first – not the way our species, over thousands of years, has generally experienced it." Read More (The New York Times, May 11, 2017)
Anicka Yi lives and works in New York City. Recent institutional solo exhibitions of her work include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel; Kunsthalle Basel; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Kitchen, New York; and The Cleveland Museum of Art. In 2016, she was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize. Yi has screened her film, The Flavor Genome, at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in 2017. She is represented by 47 Canal, New York.
Image: Anicka Yi: Lifestyle Wars; Ants, mirrored Plexiglas, Plexiglas, two-way mirrored glass, LED lights, epoxy resin, glitter, aluminum racks with rackmount server cases and Ethernet cables, metal wire, foam, acrylic, aquarium gravel, and imitation pearls; dimensions variable; Installation View: The Hugo Boss Prize 2016: Anicka Yi, Life Is Cheap, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Image courtesy of the artist, 47 Canal, New York, and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: Joerg Lohse.