The historical context of body and tissue donation is deeply problematic, with patriarchal and colonial narratives. The contemporary context of molecular and genetic biology further complicates issues of bodily donation through narratives of abstraction and extraction. As practitioners working outside the conventional boundaries of scientific study learn the tools and techniques to extract and use bodily materials, they are also learning and challenging the procedures and processes. This article approaches questions of bodily donation through the edited transcript of a conversation (...) between artists who regularly use body fluids and cellular bodily materials in their practice, moderated by Louise Mackenzie and Ilke Turkmendag as part of the Taboo–Transgression–Transcendence in Art & Science Conference held online with the support of the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, 2020. The panel challenged the ethical and conceptual assumptions made in biotechnological research and reconsidered where the boundaries of the body lie, what ‘authority’ research carries and what choices researchers make when using the bodies of others. The transcribed conversation addresses taboos of the female body, specifically menstruation, the commodification of tissue from female human bodies, human milk politics and questions biopolitical treatment of the female body. The full, unedited panel conversation, including questions from the audience, and an accompanying video of edited interviews with panellists, is available online at https://www.loumackenzie.com/offering-the-body. (shrink)

Cellular and sub-cellular material become creative medium across a range of disciplines that engage with biotechnology, from medicine to art practice. Historically, these practices complicated the boundaries of the body through patriarchal and colonial narratives of abstraction and extraction. In contrast to the ethical requirements of anonymity in medical research, this article suggests that material culture has a duty to know the body it works with. Three brief histories of bodily donation are recounted and aspects of these are contrasted with (...) contemporary approaches to the use of bodily material within art practice. The developing project, Offering the Body, is offered as an example of performative practice that reintroduces a proximity to the body in biotechnological practices and begins to question whether through art practice, the biological body can move from commodity to be considered as a more-than-human resource. (shrink)