Due to Iceland’s relative isolation, the country’s genetic pool is of immense value to researchers. As a result, in December of 1998 the Icelandic Parliament passed a bill legalizing access to the health records of the entire population to a private company. In the summer of 2001 Vancouver artist Una Knox travelled to Iceland, to research this sale of Iceland’s collective gene pool to Decode Genetics; the partial results are her exhibition In Love With Possibilities. With a projection and series of colour photographs, Knox explores the value of isolation while exposing technologies inherent to both photographic and scientific practices.

“When I make a series of photographs, I think about the act of creating a map – a map as a method of translation for images. The coordinates sit in the film between public and private experience, and become an archeology of the present. We no longer think of the world as solely defined by nations, no longer think of time in a linear progression, and no longer consider our own existence to be mortal. Our genes can and will survive. As allegory, photography interrupts the history of seeing and knowing that structures the history of contemporary society.”

-Una Knox

View the text Mistakes cannot be corrected By Zeigam Azizov