How do you know that your mother is really your mother?
The Filmmakers
Kenta McGrath (producer, co-director) is a filmmaker and writer whose work encompasses documentary, experimental and narrative cinema. His films have screened at Perth Festival, Biennale of Sydney, Ars Electronica, YCAM, FIDOCS, Fremantle Arts Centre and Bradford International Film Festival. He has contributed criticism to the British Film Insitute, Metro, Senses of Cinema, Alphaville, ScreenHub and the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.
Joseph London (co-director) is a filmmaker, visual researcher and educator whose work explores complex human relationships – with each other and with our environment. His debut feature documentary, The Beloved (2021 Melbourne International Film Festival), is an epic four-hour meditation on the untold aftermath of the Rajneesh sannyasin movement (“The Orange People”) in Fremantle, Western Australia.
The Artists
Ionat Zurr is an artist, researcher, curator and lecturer who is considered a pioneer in the field of biological arts. In 1996 she founded The Tissue Culture & Art Project with Oron Catts, a renowned collaboration that explores how tissue engineering can be used as a medium for artistic expression. Her work has been exhibited at Pompidou Centre, Museum of Modern Art, Mori Art Museum, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Ars Electronica and National Art Museum of China. Zurr is SymbioticA’s academic coordinator and Chair of the Fine Arts Discipline at the School of Design, University of Western Australia.
Oron Catts is an artist, researcher and curator who is considered a leader in the field of biological arts through his pioneering work with The Tissue Culture & Art Project, which he established in 1996 with longtime collaborator, Ionat Zurr. He is the co-founder and director of SymbioticA, and was a Professor of Contestable Design at the Royal College for the Arts UK. In 2009 Catts was recognised by Thames & Hudson as one of the “60 Innovators Shaping our Creative Future”, and by Icon Magazine (UK) as one of the top 20 designers “making the future and transforming the way we work.”
Steve Berrick is an artist and coder specialising in designing interactive systems for performance and installation. His recent works include Guardians (Perth Winter Arts Festival), Bumperball (Scitech Science Museum), Hello Future Self (Experimenta Make Sense) and Somewhere Our City (Perth International Arts Festival). Berrick has received awards for robot design, technology design and software enabling crowd- sourced place activation.
Established in 2000 by cell biologist Professor Miranda Grounds, neuroscientist Professor Stuart Bunt and artist Oron Catts, SymbioticA is an internationally renowned artistic laboratory dedicated to the research, learning, critique and hands-on engagement with the life sciences. Situated in the School of Human Sciences at The University of Western Australia, SymbioticA develops programs that allow artists and designers access to labs and techniques usually reserved only for scientists and engineers. SymbioticA has enjoyed sustained success under Oron Catts’ leadership, winning the Golden Nica in Hybrid Art at Prix Ars Electronica (2007) and the Western Australian Premier’s Science Award (2008), and becoming a Centre of Excellence in 2008.
