The Brooklyn Rail

Ironically enough, the Garden of the Virgins—imbued with religious and historical associations—provides a strategic backdrop for the premiere of Agnes Questionmark’s Cyber-Teratology Operation at the 60th Venice Biennale. Formerly a convent and now the final section of the Arsenale's international exhibition, this lush and harmonious garden overlooking the lagoon contrasts Questionmark’s provocative installation, situated in the first of a series of rooms at its perimeter.

The installation, consisting of a pregnant transbody (transpecies, transgender, transhuman) lying on a surgical bed surrounded by screens and a set of cybernetic tentacles supporting surgical instruments, transports the audience into an operating room that blurs the boundaries of fiction and reality. The viewer becomes simultaneously a participant and a subject under surveillance, witnessing the transformation of a being that defies categorization. The term “teratology,” which titles the work, encompasses both the study of physiological abnormalities and the mythology of fantastic creatures. As such, it serves to partially reveal and deliberately obscure the creature’s nature. Intricately bound to its apparatus, this being exists in a state of ambiguity, leaving us to question whether it is sustained or compromised by its mechanical extensions. This state mimics the experiences of transgender bodies undergoing artificial physical transformations and manipulations—processes that often result in their treatment as mere experiments. Stripped of their agency and complexity, they are often relegated to the realms of pathologization and mechanization, confined within restrictive medical narratives.

The observing eye, projected on one of the monitors, records the artist’s eye while simultaneously representing the creature’s, the viewer’s, and society’s gaze at large. Despite the personal and individualistic nature of transgender processes, the patient becomes a spectacle, subjected to scrutiny, and positioned as both subject and object in a broader societal view. The adjacent screens refocus the narrative on both the artist's and the creature’s physicality, displaying endoscopic recordings of the artist’s internal organs and a CGI rendering of gestation in the creature’s uterus. Together, these projections intensify the possibility of creating an alternative evolutionary pathway controlled by technology and our own will.

The unsettling and futuristic aesthetic of Cyber-Teratology Operation forcefully engages the audience, compelling consideration of the potential of human biogenetic evolution. By channeling these reflections through the lens of trans bodies, the installation further prompts us to challenge the conventional norms that govern our understanding of such processes in society. It invites a critical reevaluation of power dynamics—between doctor and patient, science and nature, and human and machine— highlighting the need for transformation.

Amplifying these questions through a satirical twist is the introduction of Questionmark's QuestionGen (0.0022 ml), an anti-medicine composed of 0.002288998764 ml of the artist’s DNA encased in a capsule, accompanied by a misinformative leaflet. By reclaiming and repurposing a medical device—typically associated with normative concepts of human reproduction and often manipulated for political ends to marginalize queer identities— Questionmark seeks to expand the possibilities of the human body through imaginative freedom and physical and mental alternatives.

This pill, developed in collaboration with the bio-hacker and artist Josie Zayner, is itself an embodiment of performance art, mirroring the durational performances that characterize Questionmark’s practice. One of the most groundbreaking works was TRANSGENESIS (2021), where the artist inhabited a monumental half-human, half-cephalopod structure for eight hours a day over 23 consecutive days in an abandoned leisure center in London. Grounded in the concept of self-destruction as a path to self-realization, this performance marked the transformation from the artist’s previous identity to Agnes Questionmark. More recently, in CHM13hTERT (2023), Questionmark suspended herself from a metal structure for twelve hours a day for sixteen consecutive days in a constructed greenhouse in a train station in Milan, challenging perceptions of evolutionary pathways influenced by science, technology, and human agency. Additionally, Questionmark's underwater performances, presented at the Gwangju Biennale, the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, and FOROF in the ancient Basilica Ulpia in Rome most recently, explore the amphibian potentialities of human beings, drawing on radical evolutionary theories while celebrating the non-hierarchical nature of the hydrological cycle.

Considering the rapidly expanding array of existing technologies and scenarios once confined to science fiction, Questionmark’s imaginary is not so distant from our current moment. Although seemingly focused on transgender experiences, a deeper engagement with the artist's work reveals that this focus is a lens to explore broader, universal themes. Central to Cyber-Teratology Operation is the exploration of freedom—the freedom to exercise personal agency to define oneself beyond societal constraints that influence constructs from gender to species identification and our understanding of identity itself. Beyond broadening our perception of the term “foreigner,” this year’s Biennale theme, Questionmark ultimately encourages us to explore and embrace the foreignness within ourselves.