Gina Czarnecki on Infected [Part A]
New media artwork is hard to categorise, says artist Gina Czarnecki, particularly on a funding application form. Influenced by eugenic theory and an early career in animation, her films take the human figure as their starting point and fuse it with digital video and processing to comment on the inevitable crossroads between technology and the biological human body. Initially based in London, Czarnecki spent over a decade in Dundee before relocating with her partner to Melbourne. Having appeared at the Sundance Festival and Cannes as well as many other film festivals in Europe and the USA, a collection of her video works, Infected, is presented at AK05 by the Moving Image Centre and will appear at the Britomart Union Fish Building, running from March 3-13. She speaks to SAM EICHBLATT via email.
» Part A | [Part B]
Infected
Gina Czarnecki | 2001 | DV Cam displayed as single-channel DVD projection | Stereo Audio | 7 min | Colour | March 3-13 @ Union Fish Building, Britomart as part of AK05
(Excerpt from artist's statement forHumancraft)
"IN 1972, when I was seven years old, our family went to Poland for summer holidays. This was the first time my father had been back to his homeland since he was liberated from a concentration camp as a teenager just after the Second World War. Thirty-two years later he was told that his sister had also survived and this was to be their first re-union.
"Part of that 'holiday' was visiting the remains of the Majdanek concentration camp. My father narrated this visit of the barracks, gas chamber and ovens. He spoke of sleeping 8 to a bunk and pushing out corpses from the bed in the mornings, of seeing a pregnant woman being left with her legs tied together as she was about to give birth and unwittingly many more gruesome details that were both fascinating, and have been lodged firmly in my psyche. This was also the first time that we had ever heard our father speak Polish. He wanted to be able to forget and I learned to remember.
"In tourist terms this excursion was not considered morbid or extra-ordinary: up until 1989, the end of the Communist regime, all Polish citizens were required to go on government-sponsored group tours to the former Nazi concentration camps as part of their indoctrination in the hatred of the opponents of Communism. Polish schools taught a censored version of history during the Communist rule, leaving out such details as the Russian invasion of Poland in and the pact between Stalin and Hitler, but emphasizing the crimes of the Nazi Fascists. Russian Soldiers killed my Dad's parents; shot right there in front of him. German soldiers arrested his brothers and it is believed that they were later killed in one of the Nazi extermination camps.
"I believe that this experience was the catalyst to my interest in human biology and evolution. I began questioning that good doesn't equal truth, truth doesn't always triumph and that the morality and "truths" I had been force-fed through a Catholic upbringing were just constructs or invention. These influences have been developed and manifested through my artwork more directly since the early 90s and further stimulated by scientific events such as the Human Genome Mapping Project. The identification of the approximate 30,000 genes in human DNA that began formally in 1990 coincided with my first experiments in digital photography.
"The simultaneous development of digital imaging technologies, image analysis and mapping the human genome essentially enabled the deconstruction of the whole into the individual building blocks, both the pixel and the individual base pairs within a gene. There was a growing belief in genetic determinism and a growing disbelief in the authority of the photograph as the arbiter of the truth.
"If one could reconstruct the illusion of authenticity by manipulating the individual units in digital imaging, then what are the implications of this for human genetic engineering? If something can be identified and isolated then can it therefore be eliminated? And is it the elimination of defects, as scientists would claim, or for the elimination of the defected?
"The Human Genome Mapping Project also ignited my imagination because of the potential for new, silent and allegedly accurate possibilities for eugenics that could sculpt the world population through invisible genocides and scientific and technological (economic) enslavement using medical research rather than religion as justification for politically or ethnically motivated mass-killing of civilians.
"The idea that the human is a genetically perfectible artefact is eugenic. There is a tension between the idea of the human body existing in a state of nature, which must be preserved at all costs, and the idea of the body as part of an ongoing technical evolution. The biological possibilities were spectacular; however my concerns were with context, who and what is defining this?
» Part A | [Part B]
» Part A | [Part B]
Infected
Gina Czarnecki | 2001 | DV Cam displayed as single-channel DVD projection | Stereo Audio | 7 min | Colour | March 3-13 @ Union Fish Building, Britomart as part of AK05
(Excerpt from artist's statement forHumancraft)
"IN 1972, when I was seven years old, our family went to Poland for summer holidays. This was the first time my father had been back to his homeland since he was liberated from a concentration camp as a teenager just after the Second World War. Thirty-two years later he was told that his sister had also survived and this was to be their first re-union.
"Part of that 'holiday' was visiting the remains of the Majdanek concentration camp. My father narrated this visit of the barracks, gas chamber and ovens. He spoke of sleeping 8 to a bunk and pushing out corpses from the bed in the mornings, of seeing a pregnant woman being left with her legs tied together as she was about to give birth and unwittingly many more gruesome details that were both fascinating, and have been lodged firmly in my psyche. This was also the first time that we had ever heard our father speak Polish. He wanted to be able to forget and I learned to remember.
"In tourist terms this excursion was not considered morbid or extra-ordinary: up until 1989, the end of the Communist regime, all Polish citizens were required to go on government-sponsored group tours to the former Nazi concentration camps as part of their indoctrination in the hatred of the opponents of Communism. Polish schools taught a censored version of history during the Communist rule, leaving out such details as the Russian invasion of Poland in and the pact between Stalin and Hitler, but emphasizing the crimes of the Nazi Fascists. Russian Soldiers killed my Dad's parents; shot right there in front of him. German soldiers arrested his brothers and it is believed that they were later killed in one of the Nazi extermination camps.
"I believe that this experience was the catalyst to my interest in human biology and evolution. I began questioning that good doesn't equal truth, truth doesn't always triumph and that the morality and "truths" I had been force-fed through a Catholic upbringing were just constructs or invention. These influences have been developed and manifested through my artwork more directly since the early 90s and further stimulated by scientific events such as the Human Genome Mapping Project. The identification of the approximate 30,000 genes in human DNA that began formally in 1990 coincided with my first experiments in digital photography.
"The simultaneous development of digital imaging technologies, image analysis and mapping the human genome essentially enabled the deconstruction of the whole into the individual building blocks, both the pixel and the individual base pairs within a gene. There was a growing belief in genetic determinism and a growing disbelief in the authority of the photograph as the arbiter of the truth.
"If one could reconstruct the illusion of authenticity by manipulating the individual units in digital imaging, then what are the implications of this for human genetic engineering? If something can be identified and isolated then can it therefore be eliminated? And is it the elimination of defects, as scientists would claim, or for the elimination of the defected?
"The Human Genome Mapping Project also ignited my imagination because of the potential for new, silent and allegedly accurate possibilities for eugenics that could sculpt the world population through invisible genocides and scientific and technological (economic) enslavement using medical research rather than religion as justification for politically or ethnically motivated mass-killing of civilians.
"The idea that the human is a genetically perfectible artefact is eugenic. There is a tension between the idea of the human body existing in a state of nature, which must be preserved at all costs, and the idea of the body as part of an ongoing technical evolution. The biological possibilities were spectacular; however my concerns were with context, who and what is defining this?
» Part A | [Part B]
This text was originally commissioned by the Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, South Australia in 2004 for the "Art of the Biotech Era" project.
