Is a Biobank a Home?

This site-specific multimedia installation for the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York is composed of three components: architecture, music and stained glass, all situated in Andrew Carnegie’s former nursery in the historic home of the museum.

Banked is an immersive architectural installation which recreates the feeling of being inside a biobank—the place our blood, tissue and DNA is stored without our knowledge (and sometimes without our consent).

As the viewer winds through a spiral of shelves of small tubes of blood in the chilled room they hear sound recorded in actual biobanks, for example the national biobank of Denmark which I documented, which houses blood from every baby born in the country since 1982.

As they walk back out of the labyrinth-like structure they begin to hear voices singing.

Correspondence Song is a short operatic piece with a libretto drawn from my exchange with medical institutions and third parties as I attempt to track down my own samples and data.

Listen on soundcloud.

Finally the viewer emerges at one of Cooper Hewitt’s historic bay windows where my Self Portrait (Pathology) is mounted, a circular stained glass window

constructed from slides obtained when requesting samples of my own pathology, stored in the medical institution’s biobanks.

Read my essay for the exhibition catalogue.

Funded by the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Museum

With thanks to:

Niki Main (composer, performer, recording and musical arrangement)

Emily Selvin (stained glass)