WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > ACTION > POTENTIAL

HERITAGE HUB
THURSDAY 2 – SUNDAY 5 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 17′ (looped)

Content warning: contains discussion of medical exploitation.

FREE ENTRY

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

Action > Potential continues Sonya Dyer’s expansive Hailing Frequencies Open (HFO) project, a work of speculative fiction spanning video, performance and sculpture. Following Andromeda (2021), which Dyer presented as a special ‘Spotlight’ screening at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2022, and The Betsey-Drake Equation (2022), this two-channel installation extends and deepens the artist’s abiding interest in mythology, activism and science – and in the elusive centre of gravity that draws them together. 

This gravitational centre is also a place where the otherwise impermeable worlds of fact and fiction collide. Shot inside the Randall Division of Cell & Molecular Biophysics at King’s College in London, Action > Potential establishes science as its own world-building enterprise. If the gently persistent, generator-like hum that opens Dyer’s film doesn’t in itself suggest cinematic spectacle, the scene-setting close-ups of test-tubes, biohazard symbols and signs above doors declaring ‘LASER ON / KEEP OUT’ certainly point to a world in which unusual things can happen. 

Before long, they do. Andromeda appears, manifesting as if beamed in from elsewhere, and eavesdrops on two scientists, who reference HeLa – the immortalised cell line, extensively applied in scientific study and derived in 1951 from the cervical cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks, the Black mother of five who was never given an opportunity to consent to her cells being taken. Andromeda wanders the lab, looks through a microscope, receives morse-code communications from a rogue mitochondrion, enters another (zero-gravity) biospheric realm, and begins to divide or reproduce infinitely… 

‘Action potential’ refers to the rapid sequence of changes in the voltage across a membrane. With its greater-than symbol, however, the film’s title calls for one over the other. As if consciously working against, or fed up with, a historical narrative in which scientific advancement can also be just another expression of racism, a component of the same deeply dubious system in which Andromeda – who the Ancient Greeks had down as the daughter of Ethiopian monarchs – is permanently depicted by European Art History as white. In this sense, Action > Potential is about space: the ‘boldly go’ kind from old Saturday morning telly serials, yes, but also the historical-institutional kind in need of a radical rethink.