Sensory Cellumonials
Since meeting at the Royal College of Art in 2015, Baum & Leahy have exhibited and run events internationally, including at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, The National Gallery of Denmark, Medical Museion, Roskilde Festival (DK), Somerset House, Victoria and Albert Museum, Wellcome Collection, (UK), Museum Het Valkhof, MU Hybrid Art House (NL), Centre for Book Arts (USA), Dansens Hus, Vega Scene (NO), Art Laboratory Berlin (DE), and MMMAD – Madrid’s Urban Digital Art Festival (ES). Baum & Leahy recently won the ‘Post-digital Landscapes’ Prize with Sensory Cellumonials. They were shortlisted for the Hedda Prisen 2022, Lumen Art Prize in 2021 and 2019, The Rapoport Award for Women in Art and Tech in 2019, and received both the Bio Art & Design Award and the British Library Labs Artistic Award in 2018. During 2020-2021 they were commissioned artists for One Cell at a Time, a public engagement program for the Human Cell Atlas. They were recently selected to be part of The Danish Arts Council’s career development grant "The Young Artistic Elite" 22/23, and are residents at BOM (Birmingham Open Media). Baum & Leahy are currently continuing their art-science collaboration with researchers at Medical Museion with a key focus on exploring sensorial representations of the holobiont.
Taste Olck is one of five” ceremonial journeys” within the Sensory Cellumonials series. In a manner akin to guided audio and visual meditations, each journey is informed by one of the five human senses, inviting audiences to better connect with themselves at a cellular level. Imagining a future transformed by understanding cellular biology, the artists describe: “Five ceremonial journeys guide you into your inner cellular sensorium: Through the domes dotted with taste buds on the tongue, the swaying temples in the ear canals, the furry forests in the nose, the sensitive soft valleys in the skin and the layers of crystalline refraction through the eyeballs and beyond.”
Facilitating these journeys are “Our Living Cellular Kin” (Olcks) – guardians intricately linked to the senses–the five kin-doms of life. The Olcks welcome audiences into their cellular habitats, scattered across the geographies of the human body. Within these cellular landscape, the complex interplay of genes, proteins, and synaptic signaling weaves the tissue of both the individual and the world, revealing the profound interconnectedness of these living, cellular landscapes.
Sensory Cellumonials was commissioned by the Wellcome Sanger Institute and originally presented as a part of One Cell At a Time, an online exhibition where artists collaborated with researchers to explore the human body’s composition. Inspired by “The Human Cell Atlas,” an international scientific research project mapping every cell type in the human body, the exhibition aims to enhance understanding of biology, disease, and methods for diagnosis and treatment.
The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Road
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
[email protected]
(905) 828-3789
The galleries are currently open. Hours of operation: Monday–Saturday, 12–5pm, Wednesdays until 8pm.
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The Blackwood is situated on the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat.