Project Fotografiska Shanghai, Shanghai
东邪西毒 (I Want to Infect You with History) is a lecture-performance in which Singaporean, Indonesia-born artist Boedi Widjaja enters into dialogue with a cell, using a DNA-encoded poem as their shared medium. The poem carries fragments of ungrounded memory: ideals of nationhood at the 1955 Bandung Conference; the unstable (be)longing of Chinese Indonesians forced to choose a nationality; and the defiance of a prisoner who, denied pen and paper, whispered to his cellmates—his story smuggled out as fragments, later built into an epic.
As the cell-human exchange decodes the genetic verses, they ask: when history has lost its ground, how might it return to body and space? This dialogue suggests history as poison—seeping across borders, infecting bodies with memory and loss, yet also seeding transformation. The cycles of cellular replication and mutation reflect this inheritance of trauma, harboring within them the promise of renewal.
*With gratitude to the National Arts Council Singapore Creation Grant, ShanghART Gallery, the Institute for Digital Molecular Analytics and Science (IDMxS), and geneticist Professor Eric Yap.
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