SINGAPORE.- Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) explores what it means to be human in a world where biotechnology and genetic engineering is becoming increasingly real. Through her works she invites us to consider how technology is changing the relationship between people and nature and to reflect on the ethical concerns around humankind’s abilities to create new life.

Patricia Piccinini: We are Connected is an exhibition that offers visitors a fascinating and emotional journey through an extraordinary universe of beautifully bizarre hybrids and strange new beings. Piccinini’s hyperrealistic sculptures, mechanised animals, mutated human beings and unknown and uncanny creatures, celebrate a world filled with wonder and difference.

Piccinini works at the frontier of art, science and technology—a place where science-fiction, the surreal, feminism and environmentalism intersect. She challenges us to consider what it means to exist in a world that teems with different kinds of life—a multi-species world she has designed based on care, empathy and a naturing instinct.

Through sculpture, installation, collage and video, Piccinini urges us to reflect on the technological age we live in and to explore our relationships with other species and ecosystems. With this exhibition she issues a call to humankind for greater introspection, kindness, human responsibility and acceptance.

Piccinini’s magical tales of past and future lifeforms are not that far from our current reality. She draws our attention to climate change and the latest scientific developments which, in various ways, are changing our world and our lives. Species die out, while new ones appear as a consequence of natural selection, genetic manipulation and even as a result of experiments with artificial intelligence. Fascinating and fearsome relationships are formed between humankind, nature and technology. Piccinini invites us to imagine a possible future where biological and existential connections are formed between humankind and other species.

For her first major exhibition in Southeast Asia, Patricia Piccinini’s presentation at ArtScience Museum includes sculptures created between 2002 and 2018 as well as her new video work We Travel Together (2021), dedicated to the tender connection between a young Asian girl and a hybrid creature, exploring themes such as relationships, love and beauty in a possible post-natural world.

Accompanying Patricia Piccinini: We are Connected is a series of talks and readings with the artist, as well as workshops and programmes that offer visitors the chance to connect with the artist’s practice and vision.