miart 2025

Decades separate the practices of Anicka Yi (b.1971) and Stefan Bertalan (1930-2014) whose poetics developed in entirely different historical, cultural and social contexts. Anicka Yi rose to prominence in New York, in a globalized hyper technological world at the beginning of the 2000s, immediately distinguishing herself as one of the most radical artists dealing with the sensorium, biotechnology and non-human intelligence. For one of her most ambitious projects to date, Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2021, she realized a series of ‘aerobes’, creature-like robots floating in the air signaling new possibilities of hybrid machine species. She has been at the forefront of tackling unconventional materials such as bacteria, algae, and scents, pushing the boundaries of what is considered art. Her oeuvre addresses the most pressing philosophical questions, can there be symbiosis between the technosphere and the biosphere?

Stefan Bertalan was one of the most innovative artists active in communist Romania. He founded the first experimental artistic collective Group 111 (active 1966-1969) and subsequently,  with artist Constantin Flondor, created the transdisciplinary progressive group Sigma (1970-1981), engaging with younger artists, photographers and mathematicians and integrating cutting-edge fields such as cybernetics, computational theories, bionics in the arts. Using a variety of media, the collective realized architectural projects, kinetic sculptures and experimental films dedicated to ephemeral phenomena. Sigma would conceive utopian projects such as an ‘information tower’, an edifice meant to react to changes in its immediate environment while offering a stock of everyday information. Nonetheless, trailblazers of their respective times, Bertalan and Yi share a common sensibility at the intersection of art, science and technology, probing a speculative approach. Their lexicon stems from the variations and permutations that inhabit the living world and its entanglement with human and non-human realms. 

Both artists tackle their surrounding environment with sci- entific rigor, transforming the biological world into an artistic endeavor. They constantly challenge set boundaries with a pedagogic ambition, sharing their visions with younger generations. Both have founded radical educational programs: in 2023 Yi created Metaspore, a nomadic research initiative that debuted at Stanford University, whilst Bertalan together with Flondor in the early 1970s convinced the Romanian Ministry of Culture to pursue an experimental teaching program.

Anicka Yi’s practice has evolved over the years into a groundbreaking exploration of the most pressing issues today. Emerging in the early 2010s, she first gained recognition for her unconventional use of organic materials—ranging from tempura-fried flowers to bacteria cultures—challenging traditional notions of ephemerality and of the materiality of art. Her early works often investigated themes of memory, identity, and feminist critique, particularly through scent-based installations that questioned the dominance of vision in contemporary art. As her practice developed, Yi collaborated with scientists and engineers to integrate synthetic biology and artificial intelligence into her work, pushing the boundaries between the organic and the machine. For her most recent exhibition in 2024 at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul she premiered her Emptiness project, a ‘post-death studio practice’, an algorithm trained for years on the studio’s output which in the future could constitute an artificial consciousness that would continue developing artworks even when the artist will no longer be present.

Bertalan’s work encompasses drawing, photography, film, and ephemeral actions. In his early pieces he  adopted a constructivist vocabulary whilst employing innovative materials such as plastics, natural and synthetic fibers or x-rays. He was also captivated by technology and employed macro photography and the moving image. In 1978, he created a collaborative film detailing the structure of a cabbage, its inner geometry and living architecture. However his preferred medium was drawing, which represented ninety percent of his output. If at the beginning of his career he concentrated on abstract, rational geometric shapes, biology gradually invaded his drawings. He then departed on meticulous and exhaustive research on the study of vegetable growth, focusing on the molecular and atomic. His works seem to have anticipated the current trend for experimental projects that combine different disciplines together bridging the gaps between art and science.

The formal and conceptual affinities between their work are subtle, yet revealing, of how a lineage can be traced from artist such as Anicka Yi to the visionary drawings of Stefan Bertalan. Their artistic sensibilities are intertwined with ephemerality and transformation. Yi’s installations evolve over time, embracing decay and mutation—such as her use of aromatic components that shift in scent. On view, Eleonora Coppola, 2015, is a testimony to her interest in using unstable and organic elements for her sculptures, a medium traditionally composed of ‘eternal’ materials. Adopting devices from the laboratory and combining them with lush translucent sheets of leather kombucha, with their skin-like-appearance they evoke hybrid entities. Bertalan, in his drawings and environmental interventions, similarly depicted the transformative biological cycles and their interactions with architectural or artificial structures, emphasizing systems-based aesthetics such as in the drawings Stachys sylvatica, 1987 and Wiederholung einem alten Problem, 1987 in which an unstable yet determined pen stroke shapes a iving and dynamic mysterious entity that in the second drawing resembles autopian architecture.

Metamorphosis and transformation are also a common ground for both artists. Bertalan’s drawings and spatial experiments reflect an obsession with the growth and decomposition of biological structures, often creating meticulous visual records of a plant’s life cycle, for example in Untitled (onion study), (1983) or Untitled (Sunflower), (1980/1995). His drawings are like seismographs, endlessly recording biological processes. They are half-way between a diary entry and a scientist’s notes, personal and speculative, filled with diagrams and theoretical reflections. Yi has also developed profound research on plant life, in particular dedicating her work to the most important living creatures on our planet, namely bacteria, fungi and algae, creating bidimensional ‘terrariums’ inhabited by living bacteria or sculptural lamps made from algae. Turning Poison into Medicine, 2022 is iconic of this line of research in its depiction of the unstoppable force of life that spreads and connects in unthinkable ways. Curiously, both their analytical processes also involve a more spiritual and mystical dimension. Close observation of organic processes and systematic studies of shapes found in organic, vegetal, and mineral forms eventually led to Bertalan’s development of an interconnected ‘cosmology of all things’. If in 1981 Bertalan started his Apparitions series, drawings that stemmed from dreams, Yi’s latest pieces also engage with a more spiritual and meditative turn, embracing the Buddhist concept of emptiness for her speculative ideas projected into the future.