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Anicka Yi’s “Biologizing the Machine (spillover zoonotica)” (2022), on view at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. (Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca.)
Anicka Yi’s “Biologizing the Machine (spillover zoonotica)” (2022), on view at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. (Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca.)

A Potent Anicka Yi Exhibition in Italy Features Bacteria, Artificial Intelligence, and Dried Shrimp

On view at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca, “Metaspore” explores the past 12 years of the artist’s multisensory practice.
By Alexxa Gotthardt
March 7, 2022
5 minute read
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Anicka Yi’s intoxicatingly sensory installations don’t just surround the viewer—many of them literally permeate the body, their scents seeping into pores and penetrating nostrils. Take “Immigrant Caucus,” a 2017 work by the Seoul-born, New York–based artist (who was the guest on Ep. 14 of our At a Distance podcast), in which three industrial steel tanks saturate the air with an aroma concocted by fusing secretions from carpenter ants with sweat samples from Manhattan’s Chinatown and Koreatown. Paired with a metal mesh gate, it’s an incisive meditation on Asian American identity, exploitative labor, and intolerance.

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