IS A BIOBANK A HOME?

ABOUT THE INSTALLATION
HEATHER DEWEY-HAGBORG
BORN 1982, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA; ACTIVE NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Throughout the United States, facilities known as biobanks house the genetic information of millions of citizens. Filled with biological samples routinely collected at hospitals and medical centers, biobanks preserve our medical specimens for public and private research, often conducted with minimal informed consent. Artist and biohacker Heather Dewey-Hagborg considers the hidden homes of our DNA with an installation comprised of three works. Banked explores the architectural and cultural footprint of these spaces while searching for the location of her own biological specimens, beginning with her “blood spot card”—the blood drawn at birth from every newborn to be screened for disorders. Correspondence Song tracks the artist’s exchanges with medical institutions and third parties as she attempts to track down her samples, and Self-Portrait (Pathology) is constructed from specimen slides she obtained when requesting samples of her own bloodwork stored in the medical institution’s biobanks. Dewey-Hagborg’s investigation addresses the potential lives of our DNA at the intersection of surveillance, cutting-edge science, privacy, and legal and ethical concerns.
Visual Description
Is a Biobank a Home? is installed in a gallery with white walls and is brightly lit. The central piece of the installation, titled Banked, is made up of large gray metal shelving units that take up the majority of the space, creating a narrow path to walk down to the end of the room at the left. Each metal unit looks identical with four shelves, all filled with clear glass vials, or more specifically “cryotubes,” with red liquid that reads as blood. On each shelf the vials are held vertically in clear plexiglass stands with two levels on each stand. There are two rows of vials that stand on every shelf. Long fluorescent tube light bulbs are placed in the center of each shelf in between the two rows of vials which illuminate the red liquid. The brightly lit metal shelves, clear stands, and the countless vials create the atmosphere of a biobank. The shelving units are arranged similarly to the shape of a boxy letter G, like a spiraling maze leading to a dead-end. This allows us to walk inside through an opening at the back of the gallery and be surrounded by cold metal and red liquid. In a corner inside the shelving structure, we see large industrial fans that are the same height and metal as the shelves. The narrow structure contains a vent at the bottom and two spinning fans behind vertical barred vent covers, adding to the sense that this is a warehouse facility preserving genetic material. Additional metal fans hang from the ceiling and are pointed down.
As we exit from the center of the shelving units, another work greets us hung from wires, floating in front of the three windows by the back of the gallery. Self-Portrait (Pathology) is a round stained-glass piece approximately two feet wide in a white round frame. The stained glass is primarily clear with a ring of light blue around the border. Thin dark lines connect the curving pieces of glass. Within the large circular piece are a couple dozen small circles a few inches wide and reminiscent of petri dishes or multiplying cells. Inside the smaller circles of stained glass are the artist’s medical slides, like ones that might be put under a microscope. They are rectangular transparent glass with small reddish splotches, each with a sticker containing information with letters, numbers, the artist’s name, dates, and small QR-style codes. Two straight lines divide the work into a cross with four equal sections. Along the outer ring of the small glass circles are several circles without the embedded medical slides. This subtly creates a pattern with the circles that contain the medical slides in the shape of a cross.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Fridman Gallery.