What would happen if 18th-century German scientific explorer Alexander von Humboldt were to meet up with biologist J. Craig Venter? Hard to say exactly, but the Viennese artist Ines Doujak imagines such a fictional meeting as the jumping off point for “Victory Garden,” one of the most popular installations at Documenta.
Doujak draws a colonial parallel between Humboldt’s early biological research forays to South America, for which he became known as “the second Columbus,” and Venter, who she tags “Lord of the Genes” for his success cracking the human genome and recent efforts to catalog the DNA of the world’s ocean microorganisms.
Toothless forest dwellers and Garden of Eden lesbians twitch out of the woodwork in a studied examination of the effects of the “bio-piracy” practiced by the likes of Monsanto and Merck, not to mention bio-prospectors like Venter. Doujak keeps it light with whimsical seed packaging design, with examples of the harm done to various indigenous people on the back, planted in a long, white container with legs.
