Trans:plant

Trans:plant is a new mixed-media exhibition by London-based artist Yani B, which aims to transfer visitors to an imaginary situation where they are free of all gender-specific associations attached to them at birth.

In their work, London-based artist Yani B uses different media and materials to interrogate the politics of identity and how it is affecting human bodies.

For this new exhibition, the artist has grown a family of 350 Aloe vera plants, transplanted from the offsets of a single plant over nearly four years.

Yani B’s passion for repetition and process-based art is consistent with their previous work on identity politics, notably ‘A Glimpse Of You’ at the International Print Biennale in Newcastle in 2011, ‘Meta:morphosis’ at the 5th Moscow Biennale in 2013, and ‘Fluid Y’ at the 5th Thessaloniki Biennale in 2015.

For Trans:plant, the punning with the trans- prefix is fully intentional – in asexual reproduction, the ‘parent’ plant produces ‘clones’ of itself. The gender of the plant is not relevant in this process, as flowers are not involved. What’s more, Aloe is monoecious, which means that both male and female flowers exist in the same plant.

The gender identity of the 350 plants does not fit our habitual male-female binary. Their identity is ambiguous. Yani B uses this ambiguity as an opportunity to explore gender as a spectrum, a conscious decision, a fluid state.

The artist will be inviting people to adopt a member of this non-hierarchical family and give them names that challenge the male-female binary. By identifying the subconscious effects of language in reinforcing the gender binary, Yani B believes we are able to create a new, freer mind-set.

Archive Gallery will be hosting the entire family of plants combined with an audiovisual presentation of concepts and data.




Yani B – Bio

Yani B lives and works in London. Born and raised in Greece, they have lived and worked in as diverse places as Germany and the Indian Himalayas. Their work has been exhibited in several shows, including the International Print Biennale, Newcastle (2011), the 5th Moscow Biennale (2013) and the 5th Thessaloniki Biennale (2015).

At the International Print Biennale in Newcastle in 2011, Yani B exhibited three major prints of their work. These works examined – through a complex series of digital alterations – the relationship of our bodies with their environment, both transforming it and being transformed by it.

In their next major exhibition, Meta:morphosis, which was on display at the 5th Moscow Biennale in 2013, Yani B cocooned nine Barbie dolls to ask what our body ideals would next morph into in an age of new technological possibilities. The artist used stop-motion and scanning techniques for parts of the exhibition, and hung the dolls from the ceiling, like question marks in the air.

Two years later, at the 5th Thessaloniki Biennale, the artist collaborated on a video titled ‘Fluid Y’ for the group exhibition ‘Identalterity’. The video drew on the artist’s personal trajectory, their self-determination, and their process of intellectual liberation from religion, nationality, and gender.

The idea for Trans:plant originated in the artist’s continuing personal journey of departing from a binary gender identity and its enforced manifestation on their body representation, beliefs, way of thinking and sense of self. Moving away from given names and finding a new name which reflected their identity has been part of their journey. This process has mostly highlighted the inadequacy of language to describe the spectrum of genders in society as well as its effect on reducing people´s lived experiences through the reinforcement of binary thinking.