Apian

25 Mar-12 Jun 2022

Honey super, 2017. Credit: Honey super, Inzerki, Morocco 2017 © Apian

Overview

Apian is an ongoing research project by artist Aladin Borioli exploring the relationship humans have developed with bees. Using a wide range of materials and technologies his work aims to find alternative ways of living and interacting with bees on a more egalitarian basis.

This project consists of a rich variety of research methods and diverse bodies of work encompassing text, photography, video and audio. The exhibition, on display in the Eranda Studio, features Borioli’s book Hives 2400 B.C.E. – 1852 C.E., the website The Intimacy Machine, the Hiss cassette, the Inzerki photographic series and The Beehive Methapor work, consisting of sculptures and photographs. These five interconnected strands will also be shown through the newly created Apian Index, an online archive in which all the materials will be available for visitors to explore.

Biography
Born in 1988 in Switzerland, Aladin Borioli lives and work between Bevaix, Switzerland, and London. He holds a BA in Photography at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne and a MA in Visual and Media Anthropology from the Freie Universität Berlin. He is currently pursuing a certificate programme in Critical Philosophy at The New Centre for Research and Practice. His work borrows methods from anthropology and philosophy and combines them with the practice of art and beekeeping. Since 2014 he has been  building a self-proclaimed ministry of bees called Apian, which explores the age-old interspecies relationship between bees and humans. The results are polymorphous ethnographies, which mix different media such as text, photography, sound, videos. Apian also aims to be collaborative and has been a site for meeting around shared sensibilities, for example with the biologist and zoologist Randolf Menzel and the artists Laurent Güdel and Ellen Lapper. This project has recently been exhibited at Eyebeam 2021, Images Vevey 2020, ICA London 2020 or CTM Festival Berlin 2019, among others. In 2020, the book Hives / Ruches (RVB/Images Vevey, 2020), a visual atlas of the beehive, was published.

Book now

Artists