Anicka Yi's film, The Flavor Genome (2016, single-channel 3D video, 22 min.), is a techno sensual journey into the unexplored threshold of adaptation, mutation, and hybridization of living organisms. Shot on 3D video, this film complicates technological obsolescence in contemporary visuality by deploying both 3D video and 3D animation systems. Set in the Amazon rainforest and renegade laboratories, the narrative is told through a commercial flavorist who is on the hunt for a mythical orchid which has miraculous properties in the jungles of the Amazon. Events go awry in the jungle as scientific procedures attempt to merge with unforeseen realities leading to unimaginable sensorial outcomes. Under the conceptual premise of the “flavor genome,” the video performs a mapping of perceptual worlds, taking reality as matrices of perceived unique essences which could enable the potential for bio diverse intelligence sharing.
Anicka Yi lives and works in New York City. Recent institutional solo exhibitions of her work include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel; Kunsthalle Basel; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Kitchen, New York; and The Cleveland Museum of Art. In 2016, she was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize. Yi has screened The Flavor Genome at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, Netherlands and the Whitney Museum Biennial in New York. She is represented by 47 Canal, New York.