Skin, a border

In the face of the pandemic, we have become more aware of the different invisible agencies in our surroundings. Like the bacteria around us, both on our skins, and in our bodies. We are now forced to reflect on how our bodies interact with bacteria. What we touch and how we move. All with the goal of reducing contact with other people’s bacteria. We are now aware of how our environment can become part of our own body, and how bacteria from our body can become part of the environment.

The works in the exhibition «Skin, a border» uses bacteria as an entry point to challenge old scientific and philosophical ideas that humans are superior and separated from their surroundings. Among the works in the exhibition is the film «Jeg er mangfoldig», where bacterial cultures grown from samples of the artist’s body play the main role. The film is shown together with a series of sculptural works grown by scobyes. Scoby are symbiotic cultures consisting of bacteria and yeast, and can also be dried to be used as leathery textiles. Through the pandemic, Pedersen has cultivated scobyes in his studio, and found that there are strange connections between his own psyche and the living cultures.

Viktor Pedersen works interdisciplinary with performance, text, video, sound and music. In his artistic practice, he tries to approach non-human intelligence to investigate how humans relate to nature. He works in many different mediums, but common is that he tells narratives. He uses an animistic view where he personifies other organisms, or takes on roles as hybrid beings. These perspectives can be, for example, an alien that comes from another dimension, a fungus that uses him as a medium, or the diversity of bacteria in the body. By trying to approach these perspectives, Pedersen wants to play with the West’s human-centric view dominating the Western sphere of thought, and in the process understand nature’s intrinsic value.