The Zero Monument (or the Human Stain Remover)

At RMIT Gallery, the exhibition Morbis Artis, The Disease of the Arts, asks: What constitutes life, what counts as a sentient being, and who gets to determine what lives are saved, punished, exploited and destroyed? Composed of eleven separate but connected installation works, Morbis Artis explores the question of organic life through particular artistic lenses, each taking on the moniker of disease to represent and embody the issues that challenge bare life today. Drawing upon Frances Stracey, the artists working on this exhibition consider Bio-art to represent ‘a crossover of art and the biological sciences, with living matter, such as genes, cells or animals, as its new media’. "Just as disease leaks its way into all matter and anti-matter, so does our understanding of the biological in the age of species and habitus destruction," said co-curator Sean Redmond. "Disease as metaphor and viral and toxic threat is employed to both condition our responses to non-human life, illness, and to regulate the way we inhabit both professional life and everyday encounters. "Of course, what counts as the human condition in the age of augmentation is also pertinent. There is a frightening collision, then, between the possibilities and limitations of human and non-human life."