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Lilia Li-Mi-Yan & Katherina Sadovsky
The artists explore the theme of the possibility of human interaction and connection with other forms of existence. What would happen if we had a new body created through interaction with new technologies, materials, bacteria? Will we be eternal, and will we remain the same humans? We are concerned with the question, what will happen to the emotions of the new person, the post-human, the cyborg...? Will we be able to refuse to reproduce ourselves?
The characters in the video are equipped with special implants and an additional organ system that allows them to survive in the modern world, where many environmental disasters have occurred. Powerful CO2 emissions into the atmosphere have led to global warming, and viruses have destroyed an ordinary biological body, forcing it to adapt to current conditions. The body of a new person, a posthuman, has learned to reproduce the critical organ systems and has also become something like a farm for growing cells and cellular organoids to create the same organs. Advances in technology and biotechnology have allowed the posthuman to survive in the most challenging conditions, reanimate the dead body and grow food with the help of innovative 3D printers and incubators. The posthuman possesses new systems of perception and feeling. For example, a system of increased empathy allows you to feel the emotional and physical state of people like him and "Inhumans". Brain mapping and emulation capabilities will enable new humans to be eternal as a neural network in digital reality or have an augmented biological body.
The characters are concerned with the same questions: the rights of the posthuman, if an individual can dispose of their death, if it is possible not to die anymore, love, responsibility, the possibility of reproduction and the transmission of their genes, if there is no more male and female gender, and children can be conceived, carried, and born outside the body.
Lilia Li-Mi-Yan (B. 1971) and Katherina Sadovsky (B. 1985) are a duo of Russian artists, currently based in Yerevan (Armenia). They studied photography at the Rodchenko Art School, Moscow. They have been working together since 2016. Their versatile approach to art practice covers such art media as photography, painting, sculpture, photo books, installation, video, sound, intervention into public and natural spaces, social activism on collection of plastic waste in Moscow.