This extraordinarily haunting film was featured in Sansour’s 2019 Venice Biennale installation, Heirloom. In Vitro ponders the mixed fortunes of Alia, a young Palestinian refugee who survives an eco-apocalypse of oily floods in an underground biobunker beneath the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. She debates the value of memory after the toxic loss of the world above with Dunia, a dying woman who recounts the ongoing history of Palestinian trauma even in threat of its erasure by ecological implosion: “we will be archives for someone else to make sense of.” The younger woman is actually the only viable clone from an underground scientific project that mines the genetic fertilizations of humans and plants. Situated in the subterranean surround of Palestinian reference, Alia not only confronts the archival enigmas of a lived history which her salvaged DNA resists, but is framed by the installation’s early twentieth-century art nouveau tiles which were housed for over a century in the Ottoman villa in Bethlehem where In Vitro was filmed. Reinstalled in Venice, the (replicated) tiles double the film’s celluloid substrate to unsettle “the idea of national representation, or any other type of ideological representation, on multiples fronts.” In Vitro provides a searing contemporary gloss on the postcolonial politics of materiality, archives, and cloning in its hallucinatory tale of the combinatory of biotechnology and political promise.

View In Vitro at the Picket Family Video Gallery in the Johnson Museum of Art from Aug 17-Sep 11, 2022.

2022 Cornell Biennial
Sponsored by the Cornell Council for the Arts and curated by Timothy Murray, the 2022 Cornell Biennial "Futurities, Uncertain" features exhibitions, installations, and performances by 23 international and 17 Cornell-based artists. Free and open-to-the-public events will rotate on the Cornell Ithaca campus and the Cornell Tech campus in New York City from July through December 2022.

Attend our Celebration Weekend from Sep 15-17, 2022 on the Cornell Ithaca campus. The full list of participants, along with the calendar of 2022 Cornell Biennial events, will be updated in real time at cca.cornell.edu/biennial.