Hilary Galbreaith

Rather than transforming ecology into an artistic subject, we should start by applying it to the scale of production, transportation and storage of works. This economy of means establishes the do-it-yourself condition of Hilary Galbreaith’s work, close to primitive cinema and zines. Born into a Californian military family with a passion for science and technology, they are interested in the capacity of science fiction to construct hypotheses that transform our relationship to species, to non-human beings, to the body and to language. In the video «The Garden», they stage a reality TV contest with humans transformed into insects. Their desire to form anarchist communities in a «return to nature» is ultimately controlled by middle-class values. However, if for the artist the «garden» symbolizes the culture of fake, it also allows them to go beyond the nature/culture opposition and identify a real need for a post-capitalist and diminishing way of life. Rather than cynicism, the artist places disorder and the carnivalesque-grosteque within the contradictions of a techno-bureaucratic world. From nasal prostheses that control odors, a virtual reality sex game turned sadistic, or companies that act as conceptual works (Golden Hole), to two witches plunged into a mutant universe where Scandinavian design becomes the aesthetic of horror («LifeHack») to a web-series published by the artist on Instagram inspired by an underground feminist film that challenges the phallocentrism of human sausages (Sausageland), Galbreaith’s work is an autopsy of biopolitical power systems.