Bio
Dr. Sozita Goudouna is an art theorist, curator and the author of "Beckett's Breath," published by Edinburgh University Press released in the US by Oxford University Press. She is the artistic director of a new art & biomedical sciences initiative in Abu Dhabi and has taught at New York University as the inaugural Andrew Mellon Curatorial Fellow at Performa New York, the leading organisation's partnerships consist of a consortium of 80+ institutions across NYC (MoMA, New Museum, Whitney, Guggenheim et al).
Title
"A transgenic butterfly with a human gene: Transfering information between organisms"
Abstract
The Melanitis leda Project is a transgenic model of the Leda Melanitis butterfly (named by Linnaeus 1758), using one of the artists’ genes .The project, completed last year, was to breed transgenic butterflies containing a gene of human origin, which miss-expressed a protein to acquire ectopic eyes. As Antiphon the sophist states “Names can be erroneous… The concepts we use are not delimited by the exact way objects are”. That is the initial point for making LEDA MELANITIS. My surname, Μelanitis, derives from the Greek root melas (μέλας), dark, deprived of light; a property probably attracted Linnaeus in naming the inspected butterfly... The broader area of my analysis is information in contemporary art and under this sense, Leda Melanitis initiates a dispersion of homonymic information between organisms. The aim of Leda Melanitis is to interweave language and life not as bio-laboratory exercise, but in the tradition of a modernistic art strategy and practice.
In collaboration with Yiannis Melanitis
In collaboration with Yiannis Melanitis
