Who gets to set social norms, and based on what criteria? Who benefits from scientific advances? Whose voices are erased? Such are the questions posed by “Genetic Automata,” an exhibition about the intersection of race, identity, and science by British artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy. A free museum focused on human health, the Wellcome houses pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome’s collection of books, paintings, and medically related artifacts. Last November the museum closed its fifteen-year-old “Medicine Man” exhibition, citing concerns about perpetuating a colonial-inflected narrative “based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language.”
The show centers on four collaborative video installations reflecting the artists’ distinct life experiences: Achiampong’s as a Black man of working-class Ghanaian background, and Blandy’s as a white man of middle-class English heritage. The films are housed in purpose-built pods alongside wallpapers featuring repeating motifs from the works. In A Terrible Fiction, 2019, narrated alternately by both artists, Blandy says, “Through these structures we live by today many others and myself have never been human. . . . We have fought to be considered equal but on what basis, whose rules, whose ideals.” Such inequality looms large in A Lament for Power, 2020, in which a dystopian virtual city is smothered by an expanding black shape representing the cells taken in 1951, without consent, from an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, and used in groundbreaking scientific research without compensating her family.
Together, the films construct a picture of a starkly unjust world permeated by racist ideologies, from video games featuring white heroes killing African zombies, to the default yellow of emojis widely understood as connoting white skin, to DNA testing kits with their specious claims to reveal one’s ancestry. Dust to Data, 2021,shines a light on the interconnected histories of British colonialism, archaeology, and eugenics, all mired in pernicious theories of racial hierarchy whose legacy has pervaded education, health care, and immigration. Both artists being keen gamers, they explore these ideas through the use of video-game technology, avatars, and virtual environments, time traveling between past and present to point up lessons for the future.
Achiampong and Blandy’s newest film, _GOD_MODE_, 2023, draws an analogy between Western patriarchy and a video game, proposing that most of us exist in “survival mode,” trapped in a grid defined by white men according to parameters that justify their superiority. Even worse is the fate of prescripted “nonplayable characters,” who have no agency and whom the artists compare to enslaved and oppressed people. The title refers to a cheat mode in video gaming that makes the player invincible, but equally alludes to the way Victorian scientists played God in categorizing and measuring humans to determine their worth. A particular focus is eugenics pioneer Francis Galton, whose ideas on racial improvement through breeding were vigorously embraced in the early twentieth century in the United States and Nazi Germany. _GOD_MODE_ switches between real and virtual worlds, the first half showing video footage from anthropological archives of implements used by Galton and his followers to measure skulls, rank women’s attractiveness, and classify the eyes of Jewish immigrant children in East London. The second half is set within an immersive video-game environment, created using the 3D computer-graphics engine Unreal. The actual objects are also displayed in the show, reminding us that such studies were done by scientists less than a century ago. An additional vitrine presents the artists’ cultural influences, including graphic novels, a Michael Jackson video, and books by Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde.
“Genetic Automata” is a powerful, troubling exhibition, yet it leaves room for hope, not least in the artists’ friendship across race and class divisions. Moreover, the possibility of change is held out at the end of _GOD_MODE_, when a gigantic hairy spider, evoking Anansi, the trickster god of West African mythology, transforms into a stag, apparently breaking out of its nonplayable-character status. Within the speculative environment of the video game, the artists invite us to envisage a potential future without enslavement and in which all players have agency.
