Extraction
Performance, Rivers of Life , Wild at Art 2026 , Salon Mondial, Basel , 17 June 2026
At a laboratory cart, I extracted my own DNA and sorted tubes just as I would when doing routine bench work. But what surrounded the protocol was the language of good genes and better babies, of winners, witches and the unfit, which has followed genetic technologies from early eugenics into present-day political speech. Drawing on my training as an immunologist, I staged the lab as a stream whose waters aren’t as pristine as scientific objectivity claims.
The performance ended with the persecution of women. I pricked my fingers and marked a white paper flower with my blood. I offered a flower to each work in the exhibition that remembers women drowned in rivers: my Phageshree Devi shrine, Roya’s photograph of the Rhine, and Sofia’s work for women disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War.