PhD student Kuang-Yi wins Bio Art & Design Award 2022 for Filthy Anatomy

A ‘filthy’ inclusive anatomy book Filthy Anatomy by Kuang-Yi Ku and Henry de Vries (Amsterdam UMC/GGD) is among the winning projects of the eleventh Bio Art & Design (BAD) Award, selected this week in Eindhoven. Winners each receive 25,000EUR to develop their proposal and create an installation that will be exhibited at the end of this year at MU Hybrid Art House.

This year’s winners were selected out of a long list of 120 proposals by artists and designers from all over the world who responded to the Open Call at the beginning of 2022. This long list was reduced to a short list of eleven contestants, who after a careful matchmaking got the opportunity to write a joint proposal together with a scientist/research connected to a prominent Dutch research institute.

Filthy Anatomy aims to challenge medical patriarchy and heteronormativity of anatomical education by expanding these to include speculative queer anatomies, and to unfold the anatomical interpretation of sexual minorities. Moreover, it explores the symbiosis between humans and microorganisms, resulting in ambiguous body borders.

The jury welcomes this re-examination of how we look at our bodies and how parts of the medical profession remain stuck in educational resources, like the foundational Atlas of Human Atonomy that dates back to the fifties of the 20th Century. The team will, in a decentralised way, remake this book into an Atlas of Filthy Anatomy, signalling how knowledge building is practiced and re-evaluating textbooks and the power they are grant. The jury was compelled by the notion of microbial exchanges during sex acts that are unknown or misunderstood. This inspired the memory of a quote from Alfred Kinsey (1966), who wrote: ‘the only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform’.