Biophilia Exhibit @ Harvard

Sponsored by the Harvard Mind Brain Behavior Initiative, a unique exhibition titled BIOPHILIA will take place on September 30th, 2024 from 5PM at the GSD Kirkland Gallery, featuring works from Hungarian-American neuroscientist Dániel Barabási and Hungarian photo artist Balázs Csizik. The exhibition is organized around the concept of life and its different dimensions. The two artists combine the tools of science and fine art to present the central theme through a variety of media, from cellular organisation to networks of urban spacesmand communities. The joint exhibition of Dániel Barabási and Balázs Csizik synthesizes the different dimensions of the interpretation and observation of life. Barabási is a neuroscientist who studies the cellular organization and developmental processes of living systems, the human body and the brain. As a visual artist, Csizik works primarily in photography, capturing and manipulating natural, urban and social phenomena using a specific formal language based on the aesthetics of constructivism. In Biophilia, Barabási’s works organize and transform cells into abstract artistic compositional elements, while Csizik’s restrained formal compositions involve sprawling organisms. Reflecting on each other, inspired by each other’s methods, the two artists explore the different forms of life and the connections between them. They use the exhibition space as an aesthetic laboratory, a place for exploring the intersections between science and visual art, urbanism, sociology, environmental science, biology, an experimental mix of different approaches. In their joint work, different concepts and forms of life make sense in a complementary and mutually reinforcing way. / words by curator Zsófia Máté ABOUT DÁNIEL BARABÁSI Dániel Barabási is a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute, whose work blends neuroscience, network science, and machine learning. He received his B.S. in Physics from the University of Notre Dame in 2017, where he worked on network models of brain connectivity, and was awarded a PhD in Biophysics from Harvard in 2023. Dániel's research illuminates the intricate relationship between brain connectivity and gene expression. His developmental results imply that the brain is not a complex entity molded solely by experience, but is a fundamentally simple self-assembling system, governed by genetic processes during embryonic development. ABOUT BALÁZS CSIZIK Balázs Csizik obtained his master’s degree in Visual Communication (Budapest University of Technology and Economics) where he’s a lecturer now, in the fields of visual communication and communication technology. He combines the visual language of photography with other fine art forms, using different skillsets. His artistic vision is inspired by modern experimental architecture and art forms like suprematism and constructivism. The common feature of his series is reduction, minimalism, which appears in colors, composition and visuals at the same time. This kind of reductivity also involves some distance, resignation in relation of the urban appearance displayed. In one of his series, he turns to the local phenomenon of post-socialist visual culture from a global viewpoint. In his works he uses custom made materials, like plywood objects and textile elements with organic surfaces of natural substrates. The main visual is based on the handmade artificial world and the interplay between nature and built elements. This is accompanied by the duality of digital and analogue technical solutions within his art. In his series he experiments with the relations between rough urban elements and nature – he also experiments how he can change the weight and form of the different kind of urban materials with the use of natural elements to give new feelings about the inhuman and brutal materials like concrete.