Exhibition runs Saturday 26 July-Saturday 6 September
Gut Waters explores the role of the human gut in reimagining our health and place in the world. The artworks will highlight how the gut connects worlds inside and outside of our bodies, by linking digestion to Bankstown’s wastewater systems, moon cycles and human poop transplants. Visitors will be invited to explore the emerging science of the gut microbiome, alongside traditional approaches to gut health that are being changed by global migration and industrial farming.
The exhibition features recent works by four Australian and two international artists, including new commissions by Eugenia Lim and Helen Pynor. It will be launched as part of Bankstown Arts Centre Open Day, an annual all-day program that coincides with Bankstown Bites. Juxtaposed with the food festival, Gut Waters takes on another layer of meaning, adopting a provocative and playful approach to Bankstown's vibrant food and eating cultures.
The exhibition is based on the ongoing research of Dr Vanessa Bartlett into digestion as a curatorial method.
Lead Curator: Dr Vanessa Bartlett
Curatorial Collaborator: Rachael Kiang
We would like to thank the following collaborators who have helped us develop the exhibition: Lleah Amy Smith, Pheany Ban, Kim Pham, Jerry Zhou and Rachel Marsden.
Erin Coates creates drawings, sculptures and films that examine our relationship with the natural world, physical thresholds and the essence of transformed bodies – both human and non-human. Her practice draws from her background as a climber and freediver as well as her deep interest in biology and genre cinema. Coates’ drawings often engage a transgressive bodily aesthetic and combine elements of human biology with endemic animal species. Referencing anthropogenic impacts on these organisms, the work also proposes possible transhuman futures. She has held solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and participated in key biennales and exhibition projects, including: rīvus: 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022), Adelaide Biennial: Monster Theatres, Art Gallery of South Australia (2020), Videobrasil - 21st Contemporary Art Biennial, São Paulo, Brasil (2019), The National: New Australian Art, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2017). Coates has a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her work is held in major state and private collections within Australia. Erin Coates is represented by Moore Contemporary.
Image by Bo Wong
Kathy High (1954, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator and scholar. Her artworks have been shown in numerous museums and festivals around the world including Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, (NYC), documenta 13 (Germany), Science Gallery (Dublin), IMPAKT Festival (Utrecht), NGBK (Berlin), Festival Transitio_MX (Mexico), MASS MoCA (North Adams), Para-site Gallery (Hong Kong), Medical Museion (Copenhagen). Her many awards include the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts. She has had artist residencies with SymbioticA (Australia), Finnish Society of Bioart (Finland), Coalesce, (Buffalo), Ectopia/Blend (Lisbon), and Metabolic Arts Gathering at the Medical Museion (Copenhagen).
High is Professor in the Arts department, and Director of BioArt and Technology Lab in Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. She is Co-Director of NATURE Lab, a project of the community non-profit Sanctuary for Independent Media. She is committed to environmental justice and do-it-together collaborative action.
Eugenia Lim is an artist of Chinese-Singaporean ancestry who works across body, lens, social and spatial practice to explore how migration, capital and encounter cut, divide and bond our interdependent world. Based in Naarm on unceded Wurundjeri lands, Lim has shown at the Tate Modern (GBR), LOOP Barcelona (ESP), Jinan Biennial (CN), Recontemporary (IT), Kassel Dokfest (DE), Museum of Contemporary Art (AU), ACCA (AU), FACT Liverpool (GBR), Substation (SG), AGNSW (AU), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (DK) and EXiS (KR). Lim co-founded CHANNELS Festival, co-wrote and hosted Video Becomes Us on ABC iView, and has been artist-in-residence with the Experimental Television Centre (NY), Bundanon Trust, 4A Beijing Studio (CN), and Gertrude Contemporary. Lim is a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship alumni and winner of Kunsthal Charlottenborg Spring’s 2022 Deep Forest Art Land Award. In 2024, Lim was one of 10 international directors selected for the prestigious Berlinale Talents Short Form Station.
Dafna Maimon’s work mutates between performance, video, drawing and immersive installation. Through fictional and semi-autobiographical narratives she surveys the ways in which humans handle recollections, stereotypes, abjection and traumatic experiences. In particular, her work deconstructs patriarchal structures and plays with them through exaggeration, subversion and re-contextualization. The study of diverse forms of community and belongingness is another characteristic of her practice; as is the realization of long-term collaborative processes. Her humorous and often absurd work taps deep into the human narrative and its vessel; the human body. Ultimately, her practice is a search for new perspectives of embodied knowledge and tools that allow for self-reflection, digestion and catharsis.
Maimon has shown her work in institutions and art spaces such as, Helsinki Biennial (Helsinki), Kunst-Werke (Berlin), PS1 Moma (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, (Antwerp), Mahj Jewish Museum (Paris), Kim Center Contemporary Art, (Riga), 1646 (Den Haag), BOAN1942, (Seoul), Center for Maine Contemporary Art , (Rockland, Maine), Gallery Wedding (Berlin) and SALT (Istanbul). In 2025 her work is shown in a survey exhibition at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki.
Maimon holds a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and an MFA from the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam.
Dr Helen Pynor is an interdisciplinary Artist and Researcher whose practice explores philosophically and experientially ambiguous zones, such as the life-death boundary, the intersubjective nature of organ transplantation, and the animate-inanimate boundary in relation to prosthetics. She works across installation, sculpture, photography, video, media art, wet biology, microscopy and performance. Pynor frequently undertakes in-depth residencies and collaborations in scientific and clinical institutions, such as The Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden. Her work has been exhibited widely internationally including at Tekniska Museet, Stockholm; ZKM | Center of Art and Media Karlsruhe; Beijing Media Art Biennale; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; Experimenta International Triennial of Media Art, Australia; FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) Liverpool UK; Science Gallery Dublin; Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney; and ISEA. Pynor has received an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, and national awards in Australia.
Justine Youssef is a film, scent and installation artist whose practice is site-specific, informed by ethnobotany, and guided by worldbuilding processes. Her exhibition Somewhat Eternal toured at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (2024), the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2024), and UTS Gallery, Sydney (2023), following earlier work at the Hawai’i Triennial, O’ahu (2022). Justine lives and works on Dharug Country in Sydney, Australia, where First Nations sovereignty was never ceded.