THE AGE OF BIO-ART

Science Gallery’s new exhibition is a bold, inventive map of a contagion

- SNEHA BHURA

The background score almost sounds like a striker slamming the sides of a carrom board at short intervals. To this lonesome, foreboding sound, viewers enter the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong on the night of February 21, 2003. Just like the “choose your own adventure” format of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the viewer can go anywhere at his own peril. At the outset, the screen flashes a warning sign: “On the 9th floor, some people will leave unscathed, some people will die.” A suave voice then leads the audience through “the corridor of uncertainty” into the bare, sterile rooms of 17 individuals who subsequently check out of the hotel, taking the SARS virus with them to the Philippines, Singapore, Canada, Vietnam, Australia and the US.

The virtual interactive artwork ‘A Cluster of 17 Cases’—showing at the Science Gallery Bengaluru in its online exhibition, Contagion—was created by the first-ever artists-in-residence at the World Health Organization in Geneva in 2018. Blast Theory, the UKbased artists’ group, reconstruct the mysterious events of that fateful day after gaining insights from key WHO strategic health operations staff and epidemiologists. They conducted tests to trace airflow and movement of people between rooms. The result was an installation which has been updated into the form of a video art for the first time for Contagion, which explores the phenomenon of transmission, not just of diseases but also of emotions, behaviours and information.