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Bodies, Biopolitical Critique, and Female Agency 
in Contemporary Bio(medical) Artworks
Sonja Jankov
Sonja Jankov, PhD, University of Arts, Faculty of Dramatic Arts, Bulevar umetnosti 20, RS-11070 Beograd, 
sonja.jankov@fdu.bg.ac.rs, ORCID ID: 0000-0003-3420-6130
Izvleček
Telesa, biopolitična kritika in ženska agentnost v sodobnih bio(medicinskih) umetniških delih
1.01 Pregledni znanstveni članek
V članku je predstavljen družbeni in kritični potencial bio(medicinskih) umetniških praks s poudarkom na načinih, 
kako umetnice uporabljajo telesa in žive celice kot sredstvo biopolitične kritike. Z uporabo teoretičnega okvira ekofe-
minizma in posthumanega feminizma avtorica pristopa k izbranim bio(medicinskim) umetniškim delom sodobnih 
umetnic, ki vsebujejo žive človeške celice ali v katerih se povezujejo z drugimi vrstami. V članku je prikazano, kako 
so ta dela kritična do številnih družbenozgodovinskih in biopolitičnih tem, kot so diskriminacija, povezana s krvjo 
in krvnimi rodovi, uničevanje avtohtonih skupnosti, ekocid, biobanke, rasna in spolno pogojena superiornost ter 
avtoriteta človeka nad nečloveškimi in nadčloveškimi bitji. Takšne umetniške prakse so zelo pomembne za študije 
spolov in študije umetniških raziskav v biokulturah in tehnoznanosti, njihova interdisciplinarna narava pa spreminja 
reprezentacijo in razumevanje teles v umetnosti in vsakdanji kulturi.
Ključne besede: bioumetnost, človeške celice, medicinska umetnost, telo, sodobne umetnice, celice HeLa, posthumani 
feminizem, študije spolov
Abstract
Bodies, Biopolitical Critique, and Female Agency in Contemporary Bio(medical) Artworks
1.01 Review scientific article
The paper investigates the societal and critical potential of bio(medical) artistic practices by focusing on the ways in 
which female artists use bodies and living cells as means of biopolitical critique. Using an ecofeminist and posthuman 
feminist theoretical framework, the author discusses selected bio(medical) works by female contemporary artists that 
contain living human cells or in which they connect with other species. The paper shows how these works are critical 
towards many socio-historical and biopolitical issues, such as discrimination associated with blood and blood lineages, 
the killing of indigenous communities, ecocide, biobanks, racial and gender-based superiority and dominance, human 
authority over other-than human and more-than-human beings. Such artistic practices are of great relevance for 
gender studies and studies of artistic research in bioculture and technoscience, where their interdisciplinary nature 
changes the representation and understanding of bodies in the arts and everyday culture. 
Keywords: bioart, human cells, medical art, body, female contemporary artists, HeLa cells, posthuman feminism, 
gender studies 
ACTA HISTORIAE ARTIS SLOVENICA 30|1 · 2025, 191–208DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/ahas.30.1.07
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Introduction 
The representation of the human body in the arts has changed over the centuries with the develop-
ment of medicine. As a result, modern techniques of biopsying or producing and growing human 
cells in-vitro have had a great impact on art. By means of such techniques, living human cells can 
become part of works of art, opening a new chapter in the representation of the human body in art. 
Such artistic practices that include living human cells are perhaps the most challenging among all 
contemporary artistic practices, usually demanding interdisciplinary and intersectoral methods and 
collaborations. Artists who collect human cells from medical waste, use already grown immortalized 
cell lines or harvest cells, nurture them, reproduce them, grow them, manipulate, freeze or stop their 
growth within artworks, need to meet strict technological, ethical and legal regulations, which, in 
the case of human tissues, are far more complex than when working with other living cells. Artists 
of such works often need specific laboratory conditions, equipment and the help of other specialists, 
all of which requires cooperation with cultural, medical and other institutions. Many procedures 
with human cells require equipment that is not widely available for sale nor can it be used outside of 
designated institutions (faculties, hospitals, research centres). Some artworks require the designing 
and engineering of new equipment that doesn’t yet exist, or the skills of surgeons and medical staff 
who have never undertaken a procedure required by an artist. 
The complex process behind the production of artworks that contain living human cells is 
usually followed by a complex process of displaying, transporting and preserving them. Each of these 
stages requires a process that may vary from country to country. For example, in the UK, to display 
artwork that contains a living tissue, an institution must hold a Human Tissue Licence issued by 
the Human Tissue Authority. It also needs to fulfil the appropriate conditions to display them – a 
regular or improvised incubator that will keep them at 37°C, nutrients, antibiotics, sterile conditions 
to change used nutrients. Such works are very hard to transport and take months-long preparation 
of permits and finding transportation companies that will take them. For some of them, it “takes 
weeks to prepare the packages to meet international shipping standards for biological samples, and 
they can only be shipped from lab to lab as research items”.1 Such restrictions sometimes mean that 
such artworks can only be displayed through interdisciplinary collaboration. 
Despite these challenges, more and more contemporary female artists are including living human 
cells in their practices, such as HeLa cells, skin cells, fat cells, ovum, vaginal epithelial cells, blood cells, 
muscle cells or even microorganisms living on our skin, which are usually not recognized as part of 
our bodies. Starting from an initial hypothesis that such artistic practices represent more than mere 
creativity at the cross-section of art, medicine, and biological sciences, the present paper is the product 
of research which investigated the following two main research questions: first, how are artworks that 
contain living human cells and that have been (co)created by female contemporary artists critical 
towards biopolitics and society? Second, are female bio(medical) artists sharing similar aims and 
worldviews theoreticians and practitioners of ecofeminism and posthuman feminism? Depicting – for 
the purposes of research alone – several artworks that present key tendencies in bio(medical) artistic 
practices, the paper explores their meaning primarily within the theoretical framework of ecofeminism 
1 Hauser, “Some Survive,” 81.
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and posthuman feminism.2 They are contextualized within the relatively brief history to date of female 
artists’ incorporating the human body in artistic practice from the 1960s, since contemporary artistic 
practices elicit critical responses and engagement by building on strong movements in art history. 
Art-historical framework: The critical capacity of the body in arts and bioart 
Female artists have had a major impact on the presentation and interpretation of bodies in visual 
culture and everyday life. They have approached bodies from the perspectives of gender studies, 
disability studies and socially engaged art. When we look at the history of art, the period of the late 
1960s set “the stage for relevant themes of self-exhibition, identity and the role of the body in art and 
society”.3 Since then, bodies in art had been closely associated with the topics of social emancipa-
tion, social status and the societal roles of individuals and collectives. In the 1970s, “[p]erformance 
art became a way that women could engage in a discussion of their bodies on their own terms”;4 
for feminist artists in the 1970s, the body became “a contested site, a problematic locus for work”.5 
Artists like Judy Clark used menstrual blood and semen in the early 1970s not only to address sexual 
freedom but also to “undermine the post-war ideal of the perfect housewife”.6
Such artistic approaches to bodies and activist engagement through artistic practices were 
among the first expressions of a critique of different issues affecting wider society. In body art and 
performance, the number of bodies could even indicate the framing concept of singular artistic works 
and actions – “[t]he singular body points to the issue of gender, the couple raises the question of 
intimacy, and the collective body investigates the social dimension of life”.7 Bodies emerge together 
to make political demands through bodily visual activism, “a performative enactment of assembly 
on the grounds of equality and insistence on interdependency”.8 As such, the meaning of bodies is 
formed in a relational way – to each other, to the environment, to the socio-political context as well 
as to the moment of creation of the work of and engagement with it. 
Even though artistic practices that contain the smallest units of bodies (cells, enzymes or 
DNA) are, in terms of media and aesthetics, very different to performances and body art, they are 
not any less critical and engaging. They often touch upon issues of identity, since in bio(medical) 
art, the human body intersects with those of other species, or its fragments live beyond the life of 
the whole. Bio(technological) art “does not depict or narrate the manipulation of biological life but 
actually performs the manipulation of life”; it does not (re)present reality, “but produces it. It does 
something”,9 showing us that biotechnology facilitates engaging not only with living matter but 
also artistic practices. Artists who use genomic in-vitro culturing and sequencing “present us with a 
2 Unfortunately, there is no space here to present the complex behind-the-scene efforts involved in the production, 
exhibiting, transporting and preservation of the works selected for analysis, which required an interdisciplinary 
effort on the part of scientific collaborators, curators and multiple institutions. 
3 Millett-Gallant, The Disabled Body, 6.
4 Newman, Female Body Image, 4.
5 Battista, Renegotiating the Body, 30.
6 Battista, Renegotiating the Body, 65. 
7 Best, It’s Not Personal, 10. 
8 Sliwinska, Feminist Visual Activism, 7.
9 González Valerio and Tratnik, Through the Scope, 56–57. 
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new form of (self)portraiture, and at the same time delineate and question the scientific techniques 
and assumptions of proper knowledge (about a person) in a deconstructive way”.10 Such artistic 
practices show that individual identity is not only recognizable from the visible form of a body but 
also from its absence, from traces of DNA. Besides that, the artistic practices of artists who use their 
own extracted cells to construct new forms show that bodies can extend beyond themselves, live, 
be modified and die outside themselves. 
Artistic works and practices that include living cells are also critical towards the relation of bio-
technology to individuals and society. Bioart speaks “about the influence that biotechnology already 
has in shaping our lives, and how they are all sustained by the logic of commodification, ownership 
and rights over who owns a body”.11 Miriam van Rijsingen notes that artists working in the field of 
(bio)medical sciences tend to be social critics: “Issues of gender, race, behaviour, artificial reproduction, 
mutation and genetic diversity are high on the agenda, while on the other hand scientists (who share 
these issues) are eager to embrace a rather classical idea of beauty, this is beauty as it is found in nature.”12
Artistic practices that involve human cells are perhaps the most complex branch of bioart prac-
tices, questioning not only how we relate to the world but also how we relate to ourselves. Previous 
research on bioart has shown that bioart raises questions about social and cultural paradigms,13 
questions such as where to put a hazardous bioengineering lab, what are the ethical and social 
boundaries of genetic research, how to know when experimenting on animals goes too far – all of 
which are part of a broader question – how to be an ethical biological citizen today.14 Bioartists are 
addressing in their works the unforeseeable consequences of genetic technologies that have led to 
“public uncertainty about implications for personal privacy and human rights, eugenics, food and 
drug safety, replacement of natural systems with bioengineered counterparts, involvement of mul-
tinational corporations with genetic propriety, worldwide agricultural monopolies, and prospects 
for the weaponization of biotechnological accessories for the military and law enforcement”.15
Bioart shows that “the question of how and why we are generating, sustaining, situating, sys-
tematizing, and regenerating living matter is not only, and has never been only a biological, chemical, 
or engineering question of technique or technology but has always instigated visual and spatial, 
philosophical and political platforms of dialogue”.16 Bioartists, through their practice, are “posing 
questions of how biotechnology alters our relations to the world,”17 they point to the biopolitical 
discourses of identity, otherness and life itself. They are enabling members of the public to fully 
understand the realities of biotechnology and also to understand that there is a parallel world in 
laboratories where life is sustained in special conditions. For that reason, contemporary artists who 
include human cells in their works have a distinctive societal role. They question who owns bodies 
and who has authority over them, but, more than that, they question what it means to be “human,” 
which is why the female agency is particularly important. 
10 Rijsingen, “Framing Interiority,” 188. 
11 Wołodźko, Affect as Contamination, 19.
12 Rijsingen, “Insights and dividing lines,” 113.
13 Yetisen et al., “Bioart,” 724.
14 Dumit, “Foreword: Biological Feedback,” xi.
15 Yetisen et al., “Bioart,” 724.
16 Johung, Vital Forms, 2. 
17 Byerley and Chong, “Biotech Aesthetics,” 199.
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Analysis of artworks and discussion: Bio(medical) artistic practices as decentring of Anthropos
As philosopher and feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti has noted, the idea of “the human” has become 
identified with male, white, heterosexual, Eurocentric, Christian, property-owning, able-bodied, 
urbanized, standard-language-speaking citizens.18 For this reason, she introduced the concept of zoe, 
which “marks the outside of this vision of the subject”.19 She even distinguishes it from bios, which she 
recognizes as a discursive and political discourse about life. The concept of zoe, however, includes all 
those dispossessed and impoverished who have never been included in the dominant concept of “the 
human” – women, LGBTQ+ people, people of colour, indigenous peoples as well as all non-human 
forms of life. What is more, for Braidotti, human bodies are “zoe/geo/technobodies,” since they are 
also grounded in an endangered planet (geo) and fully immersed in technological mediation (techno).20 
Bioart practices approach the human body precisely through the critique of the centuries-long 
concept of “the human”. Dr Leora Farber-Blackbeard, a South African artist and professor at the 
Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (University of Johannesburg) and co-founder of the Creative 
Microbiology Research Colab (CMRC), sees bioart practices as close to theoretical paradigms that are 
“decentring the white, heterosexual male human subject, and of Eurocentric notions of speciesism, 
thus calling into question the hierarchical binary oppositions – such as ‘human’ and ‘non-human,’ 
‘self ’ and ‘other’, mind and matter, subjectivity and objectivity – upon which Western discourse is 
based”.21 Bioart practices are, therefore, also contributing to a decolonial perspective on “the human”.
Furthermore, bioart practices express criticism not only of the current technologizing and com-
mercialization of bodies – including technological mediation, gene-editing and stem-cell engineering 
– but also more broadly of the exploitation of labour, climate change and the extinction of species 
and loss of biodiversity.22 Bioartists criticize the non-transparent and non-consensual collection of 
DNA, and the unforeseeable further implications it can have on the development of societies (e.g. 
Dr Heather Dewey-Hagborg) and the fact that children are being born into a posthuman and tech-
nobiological society. For example, for the work Heirloom (2014) Gina Czarnecki created copies of 
her daughters’ faces by culturing skin tissue sampled from them in order to criticize biobanks that 
store 3D structures of faces and youthful skin cells. Bioartists also critically approach the almost 
industrial production of modified and reproductive female cells, as well as the meanings embedded 
in human tissue such as blood, or discrimination based on infective diseases such as HIV. Such works 
are found in the practices of Oron Catts and Dr Ionat Zurr (The Tissue Culture and Art Project), Dr 
Alicia King, Kathy High and Chrissy Conant. 
Growing human cells in laboratories is a common practice in medicine and pharmaceutics 
for the purpose of testing medicaments and treatments. When taken from an organism and kept 
in appropriate conditions, somatic cells can divide between forty and sixty times before breaking 
down and dying. However, certain cells that have undergone specific mutations can keep up dividing 
forever. In 1951, the first such cells were discovered, and they have been grown in laboratory settings 
ever since, becoming the first immortalized human cell line. Initially epithelial cells from a cervix 
18 Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism, 16; Braidotti, “The Politics of Life,” 178.
19 Braidotti, “The Politics of Life,” 178.
20 Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism, 18.
21 Farber, “The Scientific Lab as Studio,” 184.
22 Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism, 65.
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affected by adenocarcinoma were harvested from Afro-American patient Henrietta Lacks without 
her or her family’s knowledge while she was being treated in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. 
Even though she did not survive the cancer, the cell line that derived from her cells was named HeLa 
after her and her contribution to medicine was posthumously acknowledged. HeLa cells have been 
used over time in the development of various vaccines, including against polio and most recently 
COVID-19, as well as for developing treatments for cancer, HIV, AIDS and many other diseases.23 
They have been also used in artistic practices. 
In the work (for art is like a living organism)… Better Dead Than Dying (2014) (fig. 1), Oron 
Catts and Dr Ionat Zurr (The Tissue Culture and Art Project) grew HeLa cells to form a silhouette of 
Henrietta Lack’s shadow from one of her photographs. Drawing to public attention the invisibility 
of all patients who unknowingly contributed to the development of medicine and are left in the 
shadows, the authors show with this work that “the story of the HeLa cell line reflects the biopolitics 
of race, class and gender that are embedded in the biomedical and health system, which are height-
ened especially when matters of profit are factored in”.24 They exhibited the cells in a custom-made 
bioreactor that initially sustained their life, but in an indeterminate point turned into a “death 
chamber” where the cells died from the accumulated waste. 
The artists describe this work as one of their semi-living entities created through tissue engi-
neering and stem cell technologies and grown in artificial conditions, “located at the fuzzy border 
between the living/nonliving, grown/constructed, born/manufactured, and object/subject”.25 They 
state that “[p]arts of Henrietta Lacks (the cells which eventually led to her premature death) are still 
growing and filling laboratories around the world. The HeLa cells’ biomass (or biomess?) exceeds 
by far that of Lacks’ own body while she was alive.26 They also ask themselves, how much of these 
cells are part of Lacks, if at all. The recent account shows that over 55 million tons of HeLa cells have 
been used in scientific studies around the world. The works like (for art is like a living organism)… 
Better Dead Than Dying show that connections between identities and bodies have been long broken. 
Another artwork in which HeLa cells have been used is Go Forth and Multiply (2007–2008) by 
Dr Alicia King, developed in collaboration with her friend Eden St James (fig. 2). As Eden is HIV 
positive, the work aimed to make the virus visible and touchable. After failing to get permission 
to culture Eden’s cells, the work was made using a specific type of HeLa cell line HeLa-CD4+ that 
had been designed specifically for HIV-related research. The cell line expresses a particular enzyme 
beta-galactose, which reacts when stained with the substrate X-Gal (5-Bromo-4-cholor-3-indolyl-
beta-D-galactopyranoside), causing the cells to turn blue when they are infected with the HIV 
virus.27 In Go Forth and Multiply, the cells were cultured to form shapes of army figurines and then 
23 Other commonly used immortalized human cell lines in medicine and pharmaceutics include HEK-293 (genera-
ted from human embryonic kidney cells isolated from a female fetus in 1973 and transfected with adenovirus 5 
DNA), SH-SY5Y (a human neuroblastoma, cloned from a bone marrow biopsy taken from a four-year-old female 
with neuroblastoma), A549 (adenocarcinomic human epithelial cells, grown in 1972 from removed cancerous 
lung tissue of a 58-year-old Caucasian male), Jurkat cell line (established in the mid-1970s from the peripheral 
blood of a 14-year-old boy with T cell leukemia), Huh7 (carcinoma cell line, originally taken from a liver tumor in 
a 57-year-old Japanese male in 1982). 
24 Zurr and Catts, Tissues, Cultures, Art, 105. 
25 Catts and Zurr, “Semi-Living Art,” 232. 
26 Zurr and Catts, Tissues, Cultures, Art, 107. 
27 Alicia King, email correspondence, May 26, 2025.
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1. Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr and Robert Foster: (for art is like a living organism)… Better Dead Than Dying, 2014 
(Courtesy of the Artist)
2. Alicia King: Go Forth and Multiply (detail), 2007–2008, developed in collaboration with Eden St James 
(Courtesy of the Artist)
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infected with HIV. Initially assuming the infection would spread evenly, King found out that it had 
spread in a camouflage pattern, appearing like uniform on the soldier figurines, soon infiltrating 
all the cells and turning them blue. 
At the time the artwork was created, Australian immigration policies denied permanent resi-
dency to many HIV-positive applicants as the HIV-related healthcare costs often exceeded the set 
threshold. Alicia King and Eden St James wanted to use this artwork to comment on this viewpoint 
that “portrayed the HIV positive body as a tool of biological weaponry, and HIV positive people 
as potential biological terrorists, who should be geographically confined”.28 By connecting male 
figurines of soldiers and cells of female origin which have been used for the development of HIV 
treatments, the work also criticizes the fabricated need to produce more and better soldiers, even in 
laboratories, instead of investing in a better health system, equality, education and a decent standard 
of living that would prevent the spread of deadly infections around the world. 
The topic of prejudice based on immunology is also found in the Kathy High’s project Blood 
Wars (since 2011) in which white blood cells are the central protagonists (fig. 3). Blood Wars is a 
tournament between different donors’ white blood cells that are competing against each other in a 
petri dish. The cell that wins a tournament is photographed under a microscope and placed in a fight 
with another cell participant. The artist is organizing the tournaments around the world, document-
ing the results on a website with a designed “Blood Wars” logo, trophies, and documented stories.29 
Apart from being fun and entertaining, the project is very ethical in terms that all participants sign 
the Informed Consent Forms and Participants Questionnaires and receive Participant Information 
Leaflet. More than that, the project is critical towards ideas of racial superiority, sociopolitical identity 
based on “blue blood” and discrimination associated with blood and blood lineages. 
Female contemporary artists also use their own reproductive cells to criticize the idea of superior 
blood lineages and the technologization of bodies. In 2001, Chrissy Conant launched the project 
Chrissy Caviar ® (fig. 4). It consists of 12 glass jars shaped like those used as packaging for the Beluga 
caviar. Instead of an image of a fish, each of them features an image of the artist in an evening gown. 
In addition, each jar contains a harvested mature egg from the artist. All eggs were produced in a 
single cycle with superovulation induced by a month of injectable hormone treatments taken by the 
artist. Each egg was packed under sterile conditions by a contracted embryologist into a transport 
tube with human fallopian tube fluid, then sealed in the jar. 
The project also includes a documentary-style video Making Chrissy Caviar ®; the original 
website was modelled on egg-donor advertising sites so that it includes her genetic history, repro-
ductive history, family medical history, ancestry as well as other relevant information and a limited 
edition of Chrissy Caviar ® Floaty Pen, showing an egg floating back and forth between an ovary 
and a jar, and a limited-edition poster of the label. As the artist explains, she created art using her 
body, using her genes as commodity.30 She also used her work to reflect on the cultural position of 
unmarried women in their 30s whose biological clock is dictating that they should start seriously 
working on starting a family. 
Using humour and irony, Conant critically addresses in her work the idea that women and 
female bodies are just managed environments for the growth of future embryos. The cultural and 
28 Alicia King, email correspondence, May 26, 2025.
29 For all the tournaments, see Blood Wars.
30 Conant, Chrissy Caviar ® (2001). 
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3. Kathy High: Blood Wars (Separation of red and white blood cells from human blood sample. 
SymbioticA), 2010–2011 (Courtesy of the Artist)
4. Chrissy Conant: Chrissy Caviar ® (detail), 2001–2002, Digital Duraflex print, face-mounted on 
aluminium (edition of 9), 30”h x 40”w (Courtesy of the Artist, © 2001)
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social perception of female reproductive power as an obligation is also addressed in works by other 
female bioartists, such as in Julia Reodica’s hymNext Project (2004–2008), a biological sculpture of 
a hymen that contains artist’s own vaginal cells, but which can be transplanted into men since their 
virginity has been treated differently throughout history. Artist Dr WhiteFeather Christie Hunter, 
who uses in her artistic practice hormones and pheromones, vaginal microbiome data, serum, cells 
as well as body tissue, points out that “cultural taboos impact scientific research about women’s 
bodies by qualifying false narratives and disqualifying unexpected truths, including regard for 
individual lived experiences as important (and immediate) knowledge sources”.31 For that reason, 
she is developing her artistic practices as a means of demonstrating knowledge and authority over 
one’s own body and creating the “conditions of empowerment for those who work to substantiate 
lived experiences of the female reproductive body”.32
In all these works, the bio(medical) practices of female artists are critical towards the histori-
cal and social fact that many have been perceived and treated as less-than-human: women, people 
infected with HIV, subordinated populations, to name just a few. Due to such perceptions, they have 
been exposed to discrimination and exploitation. 
Bio(medical) artistic practices and/as ecofeminist connection to other species
Ecofeminist theories argue that the same mechanisms are at the root of the exploitation of people 
and other species. Discrimination against women, colonial genocides, the sexual politics of the 
meat industry, unethical food production, ecocide and bio-colonization (introduction of invasive 
species) that in turn contributes to climate crisis all result from the patriarchy, capitalism, racism, 
colonialism, anthropocentrism and technoscience, which are “intertwined phenomena exerting their 
power through institutionalized practices and power relations”.33 For this reason, ecofeminist and 
posthuman feminist theories highlight the importance of trans-species interdependence and their 
mutual interconnectedness that goes beyond human/non-human distinction. While “ecofeminism 
emphasizes the ecological idea that ‘we’ are all in this together, although we differ”,34 posthuman 
feminists “activate modes of collaborative interconnectedness, mutual interdependence, care and 
infinite compassion that may enhance our collective ability to pull through this”.35
Bioart practices are close to ecofeminist idea of the mutual interdependency of species as a 
means of ending the exploitation of human and non-human otherness. There is also an increasing 
number of artists who work with bacteria living on human skin or in human digestive and respira-
tory systems. These comprise around half of the cells in our bodies, yet they are not considered 
human, as they do not share our DNA. However, according to artists Anna Dumitriu and Alex May, 
“[t]he microbiome, the bacteria that live on us and in us, are an important part of what it means to 
be human”.36 Similarly, artist and designer Sonja Bäumel sees the microbiome as integral part of 
31 Hunter, “The Witch in the Lab Coat,” 25. 
32 Hunter, “The Witch in the Lab Coat,” 12. 
33 Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism, 75.
34 Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism, 83.
35 Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism, 245.
36 Dumitriu and May, Super-organism. 
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our bodies and ourselves: they give new perspectives on our person. “All of us are so much more 
than we think we are. If we merge the genetic material of all our co-habitants, it will comprise ten 
times more information than our own DNA.”37 Her Expanded Self living sculptures from 2014 and 
2015 were huge petri dishes (210 cm x 80 cm), filled with agar (the nutritive substance for bacteria) 
into which she imprinted her own body so that the bacteria from her skin can grow independently 
in it and become visible. Mellissa Monsoon also exhibited living sculptures in agar, shaping them 
as bodies from which the microbiome was sourced. In 2015, she exhibited Lady Mycrobiome, agar 
sculptures in the shape of her intimate body parts, in which the bacteria found on her genitals and 
breasts were grown.
Such works underline Professor Donna Haraway’s notion that “[t]o be one is always to become 
with many”.38 Similarly, for the feminist theorist and physicist Dr Karen Barad, bodies are “consti-
tuted along with the world, or rather, as ‘part’ of the world (i.e., ‘being-of-the-world,’ not ‘being-in-
the-world’),”39 while life “is not an inherent property of separate individual entities but rather an 
entangled agential performance of the world”.40 The mutual interconnectedness of human bodies to 
their environment and the bodies of other species is, therefore, an integral, if not a key part of being 
a human. Bioart works that invert the hierarchical supremacy of humans to animals and are close 
to these ecofeminist aims are found in the artistic practices of Maja Smrekar, Art Orienté Objet (Dr 
Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin), and Dr Theresa Schubert. 
Referring to dogs as an “emotional crutch, my machine for loving,”41 Maja Smrekar in her K-9 
topology series works with dogs, which she also sees as means of “biopolitical resistance”.42 The series 
includes four works developed over several years: Ecce Canis (2014), I Hunt Nature and Culture Hunts 
Me (2014), Hybrid Family (2015/2016), and ARTE_mis (2016/2017). In Ecce canis, Smrekar isolated 
serotonin from her own and her dog Byron’s blood samples and used a liquid chromatography 
separation machine (otherwise used in analytical chemistry) to further disperse it as a smell over 
recycled wolf fur, in order to thematize the parallel evolution between wolves, humans, and dogs. 
In I Hunt Nature and Culture Hunts Me, Smrekar performed with Czechoslovakian Wolfdogs, ref-
erencing works by Joseph Beuys and Oleg Kulik as well as theories of interspecies communication 
by Donna Haraway and Giorgio Agamben. 
For the Hybrid Family (fig. 5), Smrekar underwent physiological training lasting two and a 
half months, after which she could lactate. She adopted a puppy Ada and breastfed her for as long 
as it needed it before completely switching to solid foods. She refers to the project as the process of 
becoming (m)Other and “becoming-animal by rethinking the social and ideological instrumentaliza-
tion of a woman’s body and breastfeeding”.43 The act of performing publicly with her own body and 
that of her puppy Ada was a means to “re-gain our position of power”.44 Another work of Smrekar’s 
about becoming other-than-human is ARTE_mis (2016/2017). For that work she used her own ovum. 
37 Baeumel, Expanded Self, 2012. 
38 Haraway, When Species Meet, 4.
39 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 160.
40 Barad, “Living in a Posthumanist,” 174.
41 Smrekar, I Hunt Nature (2014). 
42 González Valerio and Tratnik, Through the Scope, x.
43 Smrekar, Hybrid Family (2016). 
44 Smrekar, Hybrid Family (2016). 
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SONjA jANkOV
5. Maja Smrekar and 
Manuel Vason: K-9_
topology: Hybrid Family 
(detail), Berlin (Courtesy 
of the Artist)
6. Art Orienté Objet 
(Marion Laval-Jeantet 
and Benoît Mangin): 
May the Horse Live in 
Me!, 2011, Kapelica 
Gallery Archives 
(Courtesy of the Artist)
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BODIES, BIOpOLITICAL CRITIquE, AND FEmALE AgENCy IN CONTEmpORARy BIO(mEDICAL) ARTwORkS
DNA from it was decomposed by UVA light and then fused in-vitro with her dog’s somatic cells. 
The cells were left to divide just before the formation of the blastocyst (an early stage of an embryo). 
At that stage, it was frozen and preserved at -198 degrees Celsius, remaining as an open possibility 
or threat, depending on how the concept of becoming other-than-human is received in a society. 
These works by Smrekar challenge anthropocentrism by subverting the hierarchical differentiation 
of human and animal species. “By objectifying herself for the dog, she resists the biopower bestowed 
upon her as a representative of the human species over the animal species, which sees domestic 
animals as proprietorial objects of humans.”45
Dogs are what Prof. Donna Haraway calls companion species to humans – they are workers, 
technologies, family members, patients in “very large industries and exchange systems in lively 
capital: pet foods, products, and services; agribusiness; and scientific biomedicine”.46 However, 
as Haraway points out, “companion species designates webbed bio-social-technical apparatuses of 
humans, animals, artifacts, and institutions in which particular ways of being emerge and are sus-
tained. Or not.”47 It represents a mechanism of selection and elimination of individual animals and 
whole species based on many factors, including economic ones. Horses can be seen in similar way, 
as they have been workers and symbols of social status for humans for several millennia. 
As a means of closely understanding an animal and extending its life by becoming its surrogate, 
as part of the performance artwork May the Horse Live in Me! (2011; fig. 6) Dr Marion Laval-Jeantet 
(Art Orienté Objet) injected horse plasma into her blood over the period of ten days. The gradual 
injection was needed to gradually build-up tolerance and avoid anaphylactic shock, since the injec-
tion of animal blood can be fatal for a human body. For the same reason, horse blood was deprived 
of large cells (erythrocytes, leukocytes, macrophages), leaving the plasma with hormones, lipids, and 
proteins. During the injection period, the artist was spending time with the horse whose blood was 
used, and getting closer to it, with help of an animal behaviourist. Afterwards, she put on stilts in 
shape of horse’s legs and communicated with the horse. The artist’s hybridized blood was afterwards 
extracted and frozen for preservation. Despite being carried out as the meeting with the other body, 
the work, according to Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko “appeared to express the impenetrability of the 
body and the pursuit of expanding the body’s porosity,”48 since it was so dangerous that it required 
the presence of paramedics during the injection period. However, this also made it an act of fully 
submitting to other species’ body and accepting the consequences it may have, which is something 
humans rarely do. As such, May the Horse Live in Me! may be seen as specific apology after centuries 
of exercising full power over other species without thinking about the consequences. 
Dr Theresa Schubert went a step further in destabilizing the hierarchy between humans and 
others in her work mEat Me (2020; fig. 7). The artist cultured her own biopsied muscle cells in serum 
extracted from her blood and grew them in a laboratory into a meal-sized piece, later demonstrating 
its actual cooking and eating.49 While questioning the inviolability of the human body and criticizing 
45 González Valerio and Tratnik, Through the Scope, 125–26. 
46 Haraway, When Species Meet, 62.
47 Haraway, When Species Meet, 134.
48 Wołodźko, Affect as Contamination, 32. 
49 By using serum from her own blood, Schubert adopted an ethical approach to growing a cell culture. The phar-
maceutical industry uses fetal calf serum and other animal-derived substances to grow cell cultures, which is 
why in the early 2000s the Tissue Culture and Art Project created artworks ironically entitled Victimless Leather 
and Disembodied Cuisine to show that, even when grown in laboratories, leather and meat are not victimless.
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SONjA jANkOV
the capitalist meat production, Schubert also problematized cannibalism that was historically “used by 
the white western men to justify the killing of indigenous communities and conquer ‘new’ territories”.50 
She argues that many tribes were allegedly cannibalistic and thus degraded to animal status, having 
no rights, while even the “mediaeval Pope wrote a decree that permitted the killing of cannibals 
conveniently annulling a capital sin”.51 Her work criticizes the concept of otherness in both humans 
and other species from an ecofeminist perspective, underlining the fact that the extermination of 
both humans and animals is rooted in the same problem of perceiving them as less-than-human. 
Conclusion 
Female contemporary artists who create bio(medical) artworks highlight ecofeminist and posthuman 
feminist ideas using new interdisciplinary approaches to the human body. They often deconstruct 
bodies to their smallest units for the purpose of forming new relations to other bodies, entities 
and the environment. Their works show that bodies can expand beyond themselves through their 
microbiome or through cultures that are grown in laboratories. They can compete on a cellular 
level against each other in tournaments – also while being outside themselves, as in Blood Wars 
by Kathy High. Their modified cells can be replicated ad infinitum outside themselves as those of 
Henrietta Lacks in numerous laboratories, as shown by the works of Dr Alicia King and The Tissue 
Culture and Art Project. 
50 Schubert, mEat Me (2020). 
51 Schubert, mEat Me (2020).
7. Theresa Schubert: mEat me, 2020, Kapelica Gallery Archives (Courtesy of the Artist; photo: Hana Josić)
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BODIES, BIOpOLITICAL CRITIquE, AND FEmALE AgENCy IN CONTEmpORARy BIO(mEDICAL) ARTwORkS
In artistic practices bodies can be changed by hormonal treatment in various ways: to induce 
superovulation (Chrissy Conant), to induce lactation (Maja Smrekar), to interact with other species 
while being used as vessels (Dr Marion Laval-Jeantet). In all such artistic processes, not only bodies 
are changed, but so are humans’ relations to themselves, to other beings, to the environment, to 
medical history as well as to the here and now. For all these reasons, bio(medical) artworks by female 
contemporary artists are an invaluable contribution to the history of art. The bodies embedded 
within them are new specific forms of (self)portraiture and a way for women to engage in a discus-
sion of their bodies on their own terms. As problematic loci for work, the bodies are intimately 
associated with the issues of social emancipation, social status, the societal roles of individuals 
and communities, issues of intimacy, gender, race, supremacy, discrimination, behaviour, equality 
and interdependency. Through bio(medical) artworks, female artists challenge anthropocentrism, 
critically approach the influence of biotechnology on our lives and societies, address the issues of 
the commodification, ownership and appropriation of human and animal bodies, all of which are 
central to being an informed and self-aware citizen. 
All the briefly analysed bio(medical) works by female contemporary artists represent specific 
means of empowerment. Some of them are giving empowerment to long deceased women whose 
myriad cells are being used in laboratories around the world, some are empowering people by revealing 
the mechanisms of capitalism based on biocapital and biovalue, some are subverting the hierarchy 
between humans and animals, but all of them emphasize that having control and ownership over 
one’s own body is the power that people still have to fight for. The works analysed highlight the 
drastic consequences the lack of such power had in the past: mass killings on the grounds of alleged 
cannibalism, colonialism and centuries-long discrimination against people without favourable “blue 
blood” and certain racial predispositions, ecocide, treating women merely as a vessel for embryo 
production – all based on ascribing otherness to all those who do not fit into the anthropocentric 
definition of “the human”. Closely associated with ecofeminist and posthuman feminist views, 
contemporary female artists through their bio(medical) practices show that our bodies do not exist 
separately from their environment and other living beings. 
The author expresses big thanks to the artists for reflections and for permission to include the photographs 
of artworks. This research is related to sustainable development goals 4 and 5 of the Transforming Our World: 
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (A/RES/70/1, United Nations): Ensure inclusive and equitable 
quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all; Achieve gender equality and empower 
all women and girls. No new data were generated or analyzed in support of this research.
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Telesa, biopolitična kritika in ženska agentnost v 
sodobnih bio(medicinskih) umetniških delih
Povzetek
V bio(medicinskih) umetniških delih so telesa obravnavana in upodobljena precej drugače kot ka-
darkoli prej v zgodovini umetnosti in v drugih vejah sodobne umetnosti. V njih so telesa pogosto 
dekonstruirana na najmanjše enote (celice, gene in encime) ali pa so njihove definicije, dimenzije in 
zmogljivosti spremenjene z namenom ustvarjanja novih odnosov do drugih teles, entitet in okolja. 
Bio(medicinske) umetniške prakse prepoznavajo telesa kot kompleksne lokacije za delo, kar velja zlasti 
za sodobne umetnice, ki se odločijo za delo na tem področju. Da bi avtorica pokazala neprecenljiv pri-
spevek sodobnih umetnic k bio(medicinskim) umetniškim praksam, je analizirala semantiko izbranih 
umetniških del, ki vsebujejo žive človeške celice, zlasti celice HeLa ter celice kože, krvi, mišic in jajčec. 
V članku predstavlja izbrana umetniška dela v teoretičnem okviru ekofeminizma in posthumanega 
feminizma ter pokaže, da ta umetniška dela presegajo zgolj ustvarjalnost na presečišču umetnosti, 
medicine in bioloških znanosti. So način, na katerega se ženske vključujejo v razpravo o svojih telesih 
pod svojimi lastnimi pogoji, in način, na katerega kritično obravnavajo številne družbenozgodovinske 
in biopolitične teme, vključno z družbenopolitično identiteto, ki temelji na »modri krvi«, diskrimi-
nacijo, povezano s krvjo in krvnimi linijami, in iztrebljanjem avtohtonih skupnosti, obravnavajo pa 
tudi vprašanja intimnosti, spola, enakosti, soodvisnosti in avtoritete človeka nad nečloveškimi in 
nadčloveškimi bitji. Poleg tega so taka umetniška dela nova specifična oblika (avto)portretiranja. 
Ker so telesa tesno povezana s temami socialne emancipacije in družbenih vlog posameznikov in 
kolektivov, umetnice prek bio(medicinskih) umetniških del izpodbijajo antropocentrizem, kritično 
pristopajo k vplivu biotehnologije na naše življenje in družbo ter obravnavajo teme komodifikacije in 
lastništva nad svojino telesa in pravic do nje. Avtorica ugotavlja, da predstavljajo bio(medicinska) dela 
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sodobnih umetnic specifično sredstvo opolnomočenja. Nekatera krepijo moč že davno preminulih 
žensk, katerih številne celice se uporabljajo v laboratorijih po vsem svetu, druga krepijo moč ljudi z 
razkrivanjem mehanizmov biobank, vendar pa vsa poudarjajo, da nadzor in lastništvo nad lastnim 
telesom predstavljata moč, za katero se je še vedno treba boriti.