KONTEJNER’s curator Olga Majcen Linn talks to Ionat Zurr about rethinking our understanding of life, changing its paradigm, refusing the product-based research as well as her and Oron Catts’ work at SymbioticA and the future restructuring of the institute, following up on the “Life as an object” symposium at Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana (February 2022).
Ionat Zurr is the Chair of the Fine Arts Discipline at the School of Design UWA, and SymbioticA’s academic coordinator. She was a Visiting Professor at Biofilia – Based for Biological Arts, Aalto University, Finland (2015-2020); a visiting scholar at The Centre of Arts and Art History at Stanford University (2007), and a Research Fellow at The Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Harvard Medical School (2000-2001). She is considered a pioneer in the field of Biological Arts, and publishes and exhibits nationally and internationally. Her work was exhibited and collected by museums such as Pompidou Centre in Paris, MoMA NY, Mori art Museum, NGV, GoMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Ars Electronica, National Art Museum of China, and more. Zurr, together with Catts, has ideas and projects that reach beyond the confines of art; their work is often cited as inspiration to diverse areas such as bio-fabrication, cellular agriculture, new materials, textiles, design, architecture, ethics, fiction, and food.
Olga Majcen Linn graduated Art History and Comparative literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. Engaged in curatorial work since 2002 through NGO KONTEJNER, she has founded the NGO and authored many renowned international projects (Device_art, Touch Me, Extravagant bodies). Since 2003, she has been working at the Gallery VN in Zagreb, where she presents young and emerging Croatian artists. In this gallery, Majcen Linn has organized over 120 exhibitions. She is also active in the field of social theory and critique: she has worked and written for the TV show Transfer, the radio show Kretanje točke, T-portal, the journals Zarez and Život umjetnosti, Up&Underground, etc. She is a member of the international board of the Beijing triennial of new media arts, and a member of AICA.
Production: KONTEJNER, 2022
Audio editing: Filip Pacak