Artist Talk: Goldin+Senneby
With the piercing of a citrus thorn into a starfish larvae in 1882, zoologist Elie Metchnikoff simultaneously pushed the legal concept of immunity into biology, introducing a violent new metaphor for imagining how living organisms co-exist in this world.
In this artist talk, Goldin+Senneby revisit this meeting of the starfish and the citrus thorn from the perspective of living with an autoimmune condition and a growing discomfort with the very language which frames such a condition. A sense that the metaphors themselves are a thorn in the side.
Goldin+Senneby is a Stockholm-based artist subject. Since 2004 their work has explored the structural correspondence between conceptual art and finance capital, drawn to its (il)logical conclusions. Recent works include a ghostwritten detective novel about an offshore company on the Bahamas (2007-2015), a magic trick for the financial markets (2016) and a proposal for an eternal employment at a train station (2026-). Currently their practice is mutating: Drawing on bodily experiences of an autoimmune disease, they are staging a fiction with an ”autoimmune tree” as the main protagonist.