It appeared becoming that my studio go to with Agnes Questionmark happened within the Brooklyn Navy Yard, as there’s an aquatic dimension to all her work. Her key preoccupation is the trans physique, that means without delay transgender, transhuman, and trans-species, but when she might develop into something, I imagine it could be sea creature, with fins or tentacles, or each.
Questionmark is greatest identified for elaborate multimedia efficiency works, however in between these, she retains busy. Her present work begins with photos printed on cloth, then over-painted with a mixture of acrylic paint and silicone. Most are of hearts and different organs, in vivid reds and oranges, sensuous but uncanny. She let me contact them. I needed to press my cheek towards them, however as we’d simply met, it felt presumptuous to ask.
She shared with me a few of her analysis materials, her deep dive into specialised medical expertise corporations. One firm has machines that maintain human lungs, livers, and hearts going whereas awaiting transplants. Its web site seems identical to these for corporations that promote industrial air conditioners or deep fryers: They enlist company aesthetics, however for human organ machines. “I’m within the often unseen integration of flesh and tech,” she says.
Her favourite medium is silicone. It’s uncanny stuff, nearly like flesh however not fairly. It’s inert sufficient to remain contained in the human physique. Since each Questionmark and I are transgender, we talked about our experiences with physique modification. Particulars I received’t share as they’re only for us women. Being trans can result in all kinds of adventures with the medical-industrial complicated, though everybody’s physique is enmeshed with machines in bizarre methods.
Agnes Questionmark: CHM13hTERT, 2023.
What else may a physique develop into? That appears to be the query motivating Questionmark, notably since her 2021 work TRANSGENESIS. Each an set up and a efficiency staged at Harlesden Highstreet in London, the work noticed Agnes reworked into an enormous hybrid creature, tentacles coiling beneath her. She gently waved her arms, as if in water, 8 hours a day for 23 days.
Later, in CHM13hTERT (2023), Questionmark once more grew to become some form of chimeric sea creature, this time with fins. She spent 12 hours a day for 16 days in a glass enclosure at a subway station in Milan, suspended through slings and cables in a casing with a mermaid-like tail some 20 toes lengthy. One thing about monstrousness may be triggering: She tells me of viewers who yelled at her and banged on the glass. The title CHM13hTERT refers to a cell line developed to review the human genome. For Questionmark, this encoding implies that, “maybe someday, we can modify it and form it as we want.”
Questionmark made a current artist’s version, QuestionGen (2024), in collaboration with biohacker Josie Zayner, and the Italian writer Nero. It’s a single capsule containing a tiny little bit of Agnes’ DNA, boxed up in a blister pack like an everyday prescription drug, full with a misinformation leaflet.
What I really like about Questionmark is her infectious enthusiasm for exploring all the probabilities of flesh and tech, tempered by wholesome critique. Past that, what intrigues me is the strain her work holds between magnificence and the uncanny. Her work offers me hope that we will love issues that change into not what was anticipated, a sense most trans individuals know effectively.
