Commissioner: Victoria Lynn

Curator: Linda Michael

Project Manager: Global Art Projects 

 

Patricia Piccinini's exhibition We are Family was Australia's official presentation for The 50th Venice Biennale 2003.

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Within the domestic spaces of the Australian Pavilion a family of art works by Patricia Piccinini was created for the Venice Biennale. 

Piccinini's exhibition, We Are Family, brought a fresh, personal perspective to some of the most difficult bio-ethical issues of our time: What is normal? What constitutes a human being? Where does one species end and the other begin? Are some lives worth more than others? What is a family?

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The promise and the perils of our runaway scientific developments - cloning, genetic manipulation and animal-to-human organ transplants - are given form. Her work explores the changing relationship between what is considered natural and what is artificial, what is 'normal' and mutant.

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Piccinini's works embody our dreams of perfect children, of life disease-free, yet always articu-late the value of difference and uncertainty. They emerge from a deep personal understanding of the issues involved in medical intervention in human life.

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We Are Family included:

• Team WAF (Precautions), helmets, each a strange mixture of mask, motorcycle helmet and prosthetic device, hint at the radically different beings that populate the Pavilion;

• Game Boys Advanced, young cloned twin boys, who on close inspection show signs of old age - grey hairs, age-spots and wrinkles;

• The Young Family, a trans-species mother with a litter of suckling pups;

• Leather Landscape, a toddler clad in pink plays with some naked, unidentifiable animals on a leather form inspired by automotive design;

• Still Life with Stem Cells, a young girl cares for a group of strange embryonic lumps with veined and hairy skin;

• Plasmid Region, a video depicts an endless cycle of amorphously corporeal creation and growth.