When Dust Is Gone was an exhibition that explored the body from posthuman and eco-critical perspectives. The show featured eleven emerging artists from around the world, which a focus on practices that fused aspects of science and technology with visual art.

Guilty Flavours
Elonora Ortalani

Guilty Flavours was an ambitious project that harnessed microbiology to re-engineer plastic waste for human consumption. In a radical new proposal, Ortolani illustrated how humans can harness our own bodies to eliminate plastic forever - by eating it.

Within our show, Ortolani presented the first sample of vanilla ice cream flavoured with bio-technical vanillin.

Keyannah Isaacs

“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you shall return”

-        Genesis, 3:19-24

We began the development of this show by thinking about bodies. Where is your body? Why is it, now, and as it is? When is it, and because of what?

Simultaneously innate, ubiquitous, immediate, and undeniable, bodies are also sites of conflict, confusion, and disagreement. They collide with each other and they catalyse immense momentum. Then they reject, they refuse, and dispel. They come together, breathe in and breathe out the same air, and they stand alone.

 Western individualism has birthed a confusion upon our ideals of what it means to have, to be, a body. We’ve lost any sense of connection – be it from the star dust that made our molecules or the watery wombs that spat us back out into the world.

 With this in mind - the understanding that each of our bodies are composed of the same cosmic compost as the next - it seems counter-intuitive to consider our bodies as necessarily individual or only ever ‘human’. Rather, our being is integrated within the plurality of a natural world, something which we are fundamentally a part of, not separate to or privileged from. Multiple time spans and localities seep into our bodies, our cultures, our homes whilst, in turn, we impact the planet’s climate and ecosystems, affecting worlds and societies to come. The technological milieu, then, has served to underline of hybrid nature. The intimacy of digitalisation is as close as nature ever was, but now our contingencies are rapidly generative and physically readable.

‘When Dust is Gone’ hoped to inspire a contemplation into the connections that run throughout our bodies and into the world around them, and further to interrogate the implications of ignoring our interconnected nature. Featuring ten exciting emerging artists from around the world, we delve into a world of the speculative, the surreal, the pessimistic, and the hopeful.

Featuring: Tianju Chen / Francis Payne / Shangyang Yu / Liz Ebengo / Sojung Park / Keyannah Isaacs / Zheng Yuan / Elonora Ortolani / Emily Tonelli / Millicent Sutton / Charlie Jimenez