MBCF

About the Work

MBCF (= Mobile Biological Surgical Research Facility) transforms the gallery into a temporary laboratory. Visitors bring dead plants, the patients, into the exhibition, placing them at the center of artistic interventions. Using drawing, sculptural, and additive techniques, the artist extends and alters the plants, supplementing them with artificial leaves, flowers, or structures, staging an open process of “revival” that is explicitly artistic, not biological. At the end of the exhibition, visitors can take their patients home again, creating a closed cycle of submission, transformation, and return.

At the heart of the work is the question of the boundary between life and death. It asks what it means for something to be alive in a context where perception, form, and attention play a decisive role. MBCF suggests that life is not a fixed biological state, but an open relationship between material, action, and observation, a liminal space that is neither fully dead nor fully alive. The artistic process probes the conditions under which we perceive something as living, without offering definitive answers.

Secondarily, MBCF reflects on the notion of the artistic genius. The work opens a space for questions about authorship, intervention, and the autonomy of things, while simultaneously raising fundamental questions about transience, perception, and transformation. It invites viewers to engage with uncertainty, ambiguity, and the unresolved.

Exhibtitions

2023 MBCF MUTABOR, Hannover, GER

Technical requirements / exhibition conditions

- Gallery space that can be staged as a laboratory
- Work and display tables
- Performative work at set times or continuously during the exhibition
- Return of the plants to visitors at the end of the exhibition
- Modular setup, adaptable to different spaces