Marina Zurkow

PROVENANCE: Courtesy of the Artist

Porcelain plates and prints of botanical specimens adorn the well-mannered house, signifying both knowledge of nature and a naming of nature. Far from folk wisdom, a complex quest is reified through these wall decorations, to synthesize symbolism, mythology, knowledge, and identification (taxonomy). These display plates represent psychoactive plants whose effects on our bodies often bring us closer to the more-than-human world.

Marina Zurkow is a multi-disciplinary artist focused on near-impossible nature and culture intersections. She uses life science, materials, and technologies – including food, software, animation, clay and other biomaterials – to foster intimate connections between people and non-human agents. She works as a founding member of several ongoing collaborative projects, including Making the Best of It, Dear Climate, More&More Unlimited, Climoji, and Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies.

Recent solo exhibitions include bitforms gallery, New York and Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; her work has been featured at Storm King Art Center, New York; 21C Museum, Louisville; the 7th Moscow Biennale; FACT, Liverpool; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; 01SJ Biennial, San Jose; Sundance Film Festival, Utah; and the Seoul Media City Biennial, Korea, among others.

Her public art engagements have been supported by Creative Time, New York; LACE, Los Angeles; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; The New Museum’s Ideas City, New York; Northern Lights.mn, Minneapolis; The Artist’s Institute, New York; 01SJ Biennial, San Jose, California; Rice University, Houston; Boston University; University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; and Baruch College, New York.

Zurkow is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow. She has also been granted awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is a teaching fellow in the Masters in Public Action Program at Bennington College, a fellow at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, and resides in Vermont and Brooklyn, NY. She is represented by bitforms gallery.