Anicka Yi | A Cloud Never Dies, 2022

A Cloud Never Dies (2022) accompanies Anicka Yi’s solo exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca, “Metaspore.”
The edition is a print on aluminum that depicts a snapshot of the colors and shades of the bacterial life inside Biologizing the Machine (terra incognita), a work previously exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2019. The show at Pirelli HangarBicocca presents a new, expanded version of the installation, which is titled Biologizing the machine (spillover zoonotica) and consists of seven glass cases containing Winogradsky cultures—micro-ecosystems of soil bacteria and algae. These organisms interact with the surrounding environment through continuous cycles of growth, stasis, and decay, creating pigmentations that change during the period of the exhibition. A Cloud Never Dies captures a single moment in the delicate self-generating process of the work, suggesting new possibilities for hybridisation between the fields of art and science. As evoked by the title itself, the work crystallises a moment that is as fleeting as that of a passing cloud.

Anicka Yi (b. Seoul; 1971, lives and works in New York) is one of the most radical artists on the contemporary scene. Her research contributes to the current debate on the redefinition of the categories of human and machine, natural and synthetic. Anicka Yi’s solo exhibitions have been held in many leading international institutions, including the Hyundai Commission, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2021); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); Fridericianum, Kassel (2016); Kunsthalle Basel, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Kitchen, New York (2015) and Cleveland Museum of Art (2014).