caitlin berrigan
Art that ingests / Gain at the expense of contamination / Art that exists in the bodies of the audience
Through edible sculpture, video performance and participatory actions, Caitlin Berrigan initiates dialogue about the unnerving spaces of biopolitics and culture. She facilitates a circuit of transactions among people and material things in which the audience and the artwork become indistinguishable. Symbolically charged materials—such as milk, marshmallows, viruses and bodily organs—are put into tension with intimacy, humor and disgust. This delicately provocative tactic sparks dissonance in the audience’s visceral and cognitive experience of her work, allowing multivalent readings and responses. In producing anxiety and revealing layers of ambiguous emotions, Berrigan’s artwork opens a space of potential to confront uncertainty within the context of social issues.
Common threads in her work include embodied knowledges and making space to air our complicated antagonisms and co-evolutions with pathogens. Viral Confections are edible chocolates shaped into the protein structure of the hepatitis C virus. Desire to eat the enticing chocolates is mixed with repulsion for the infectious virus. This unnerving dialectic has proved to be an exciting and approachable way to ignite discussion and create awareness about an extremely prevalent and underrepresented disease. Boobalicious is an ice cream social with kulfi-flavored ice cream made from human breast milk, provoking visceral responses that reveal our cultural conditioning to reproductive technologies, the abject, the pleasurable, and the taboo. Traces is a renewable sculpture of the artist’s own disembodied kidney, cast in frozen spit. Every two hours a new frozen organ is put on display, only to melt and drip away. The artist carefully traced the topography of her internal organ from a 3D MRI in order to materialize its form outside of her body.
Berrigan has presented her work internationally, including at the Whitney Museum’s Initial Public Offerings, Storefront for Art & Architecture, Gallery 400 Chicago, Anthology Film Archives, the Vancouver Olympics and 0047 Gallery Oslo. She has been an invited speaker at the New Museum, Harvard Medical School, and the Max Planck Institute. Berrigan received an Agnes Gund fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (2008) and was an artist in residence at PROGRAM in Berlin (2009) and the Bioarts Initiative at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2007). She holds a Master’s in visual art from MIT (2009) and a B.A. in art history and production from Hampshire College (2004). Raised in Mendocino, California and schooled in Massachusetts, she has lived in New York City, Paris and Berlin. She is currently living in between one place and another and hopes to find you there.
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| education |
2009 M.S. Visual Arts Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
2004 B.A. Art History & Art Production, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA
2003 Brown University Paris, France, Exchange at Vincennes-St. Denis Paris VIII
| residencies |
2010 Vermont Studio Center, Clowes Foundation Fellowship, Johnson, VT
2009 PROGRAM, Berlin, Germany
2008 Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME
2007 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center for Biotechnology & Bioart, Troy, NY
2006 Bent Festival 2006, LMCC Swing Space, New York, NY
2005 Experimental Television Center, Owego, NY
Talent Campus, 55th annual Berlinale International Film Festival, Berlin, Germany
| grants & awards |
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| 2008 | Agnes Gund Fellowship, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture |
| Schlossman Research Fellowship, M.I.T. Architecture Department | |
| Harold & Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts, M.I.T. Council for the Arts & Student Art Association | |
| M.I.T. Council for the Arts Grants for “Life Cycle of a Common Weed” & “Resonance” | |
| 2007 | Collaborative public artwork commission with Beam Camp, Moultonborhough, NH |
| M.I.T. Council for the Arts Grant for “The Knit Virus” | |
| Tuition Fellowship, MIT Architecture Department | |
| 2004 | The Foundation for Psycho-Cultural Research & Hampshire College grant for “La Specola” |
| 1999 -04 |
Johnson Merit Scholarship for Academic Achievement, Hampshire College |
| selected exhibitions & events e - exhibition | s - screening | p - performance | w - event/workshop |
| 2010 | |
| e | Maribel Lopez Gallery, “Avalanche,” group exhibition, Berlin, Germany |
| e | Institute of Contemporary Art, “Exchange,” curated by Lauren Fensterstock, Maine College of Art, Portland, ME |
| p | Queen Elizabeth Theatre, “Culture Shock: Video Interventions,” curated by Vancouver Art Gallery for the Olympics, Vancouver, BC |
| 2009 | |
| e p | Program Gallery, “Herring Under a Fur Coat,” curated by Carson Chan, Berlin, Germany |
| e | Mills Gallery, “And Things of That Nature” Boston, MA |
| p | Scheltema Complex, Leiden, Netherlands, “And the Cow Jumps Over the Moon,” collaboration with Boo Chapple |
| w | Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, Cambridge, MA, “Speaking to the Inside,” Waves & Signs Conference |
| 2008 | |
| w | Whitney Museum of American Art, Initial Public Offerings series, talk & commissioned artwork, New York, NY |
| e | PS 122 Gallery, “The Audacity of Desperation,” New York, NY |
| e p | Gallery 400, “Biological Agents,” 3-person show with Natalie Jeremijenko & Brandon Ballengée, Chicago, IL |
| e | Sea and Space Gallery, “The Audacity of Desperation,” Los Angeles, CA |
| e p | Jamaica Arts Center, “Metro Poles: Art in Action,” collaboration with Tattfoo Tan & Emcee C.M. Master of None, Jamaica, NY |
| e p | Playspace Gallery, California College of the Arts, “Multispecies Salon,” curated by E. Kirksey & M. Johnston, San Francisco, CA |
| 2007 | |
| e | Storefront for Art & Architecture, “Lost and Found City,” New York, NY |
| e p | SIGGRAPH 34th International Conference & Exhibition, San Diego, CA |
| e | Eyebeam Gallery, Bent Festival, New York, NY |
| e | Dumbo Arts Center, Art Under the Bridge Festival, Brooklyn, NY |
| s | Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego Women’s Film Festival, San Diego, CA |
| e s | National Museum of Women in the Arts, 20th Anniversary Festival of Media Arts, Washington, D.C. |
| e | Antwerp Zoo, “Confronting Mortality with Art and Science” conference exhibition & catalogue, Antwerp, Belgium |
| e | Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts, “Catapult,” Annapolis, MD |
| e | Galerie Paris 8, “Regards Intérieurs,” Paris, France |
| 2006 | |
| e p | Visualizing TRANS Conference & Exhibition, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI |
| s | Hammer Museum of Art, 10th Biennial L.A. Freewaves Festival, Los Angeles, CA |
| p | Conflux Festival for Psychogeography, McCaig-Welles Gallery, Brooklyn, NY |
| e | William Paterson University Gallery, “More Than Meets the Eye,” Wayne, NJ |
| e | Secret Project Robot, “Cabin Comforts” group exhibition, Brooklyn, NY |
| e | The Tank, Bent Festival, New York, NY |
| p | Merkin Concert Hall, “Mosheh,” video collaboration for a multimedia opera by Yoav Gal, New York, NY |
| e | Westnorth Studio, “gender-f,” curated by Deb King of Markszine, Baltimore, MD |
| 2005 | |
| s | Anthology Film Archives, NewFilmMakers Series, New York, NY |
| e | Markszine.com online arts magazine commission |
| e s | Women in the Director’s Chair 24th Annual Festival, Chicago, IL |
| e s | New Media Art Festival, Bangkok, Thailand |
| e | Stuttgarter Filmwinter 18th annual New Media Festival, Stuttgart, Germany |
| s | Center for Contemporary Art, program curated by Anne Bray, Tel Aviv, Israel |
| s | Corriente Hipermediatica Experimental Latinoamericana, program curated by Anne Bray, Bueno Aires, Argentina |
| s | Encuentro Internacional de Espacios Independientes, program curated by Anne Bray, Valparaiso, Chile |
| 2004 | |
| s | 404 Electronic Art Festival São Paulo, Brazil |
| e s | Waywood Gallery & Side Cinema, “We Are Transparent” group exhibition, Newcastle, UK |
| s | Redcat Theatre, L.A. Freewaves 9th Biennial Festival, Los Angeles, CA |
| w | The Kitchen, 9th Annual Street Fair, New York, NY |
| e | “Pilot TV” symposium & exhibition, Diamonds & Texas Ballroom, Chicago, IL |
| e | MediaCentre at Le Musée di-visioniste, “VideoChannel: Violence XP” Group Programme |
| e s | Gallery TK, Northampton, MA, solo exhibition: “La Specola: Medical Examination & Archetypes of the Vagina Dentata” |
| e s | Hampshire College Main Gallery & Main Lecture Hall, Amherst, MA, solo exhibiton & screening: “La Specola” | s w | Reproductive Rights 18th Annual Conference, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA |
| 2003 | |
| s | Women in the Director’s Chair, Chicago, IL, “Gorge: Films about Food” curation & screening |
| e | “Rencontres A3” group exhibition with Orlan, Pierre & Gilles, others, Place Saint-Sulpice, Paris, France |
| public lectures |
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| 2009 | PROGRAM, “Unresolved Anxieties & Other Political Tactics,” Berlin, Germany |
| Centre for Interdisciplinary Arts, “Food,” presentation & participatory event with Boo Chapple, Perth, Australia | |
| SymbioticA, University of Western Australia, “Contamination & Incorporation,” Perth, Australia | |
| 2008 | New Museum & Rhizome, New Science panel, “Media art in the age of cloning, transgenics and genomics,” curated by Régine Debatty New York, NY |
| Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, “Improvising Glycoproteins: A case study in artistic virology,” Berlin, Germany | |
| Harvard Medical School, BioArt Seminar Lecture Series, Boston, MA | |
| M.I.T. History, Theory & Criticism, “What Object?” symposium, Cambridge, MA | |
| 2007 | Location One, Dorkbot presentation, New York, NY |
| selected media & press |
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Portland Phoenix: Annie Larmon, “Interplay: the ICA’s concept-driven show,” February 17, 2010 (Review) |
| professional experience |
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Teaching Assistant, Cambridge, MA 2007-2008 |
