Anicka Yi: 2023-2024 Josep Luis Sert Practitioner in the Arts

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University are excited to welcome artist Anicka Yi as the 2023-2024 Josep Luis Sert Practitioner in the Arts.

Anicka Yi (b. 1971 in Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean-American conceptual artist known for her focus on olfaction and her use of unorthodox, living, and perishable materials. Informed by scientific research, biology, and perfumers, Yi has produced a unique body of work over the past decade at the intersection of politics and macrobiotics. Her practice questions the increasingly hazy taxonomic distinctions between what is human, animal, plant and machine, and is the result of an alchemical process of experimentation that explores often incompatible materials. She collaborates with researchers to create media that are often inherently political, and delves into the cultural conditioning of sense and perception in a way she describes as a “biopolitics of the senses.” Her diverse installations, which draw on scientific concepts and techniques to activate vivid fictional scenarios, ask incisive questions about human psychology and the workings of society. Yi’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; Tate Modern, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Kitchen, New York; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. In 2016, Yi was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize and in 2019 her work was featured in the 58th International Venice Biennale, titled May You Live In Interesting Times. Anicka Yi was awarded the 2020 Tate Turbine Hall Hyundai Commission.