Günes Isitan / artist-researcher in biomedia arts

Günes-Hélène Isitan is a Canadian artist-researcher in biomedia arts. Her practice, at the intersection of art, biology and philosophy, explores the cultural barriers we build in the life continuum. Going beyond anthropocentrism, her visual pieces and living installations reveal the interdependency relations and co-becoming fates from which we and our world emerge, and crystallise those transient moments of human and non-human realities in co-becoming.

 

Created in a laboratory using methods borrowed from microbiology and molecular biology, her works present realities that, although undoubtedly ours, are located beyond our five senses. They set forth a multispecies humanity, where skin is neither a container nor a limit; a humanity who, by relinquishing its exceptionalism claim, no longer appear in isolation, looking at nature from above, but is rather revealed as thoroughly entangled with it.

 

Günes-Hélène holds graduate diplomas from Sherbrooke University in Microbiology and in Actual Art Practice, and studied Studio Arts at Concordia University. She has been invited to take part in residencies in various research laboratories. She presented her work in individual and group exhibitions in galleries and museum in Canada, the USA, Germany, Korea and Australia; her work is also featured in books and art magazines internationally. She is a recipient of CALQ , CAC and CAM research grants.