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Dr. WhiteFeather Hunter

@astrodesia

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Leader in biotech + art + menstrual stem cells 🩸🧫
The Witch in the Lab Coat #witchesinlabs
PI @bioartincanada
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow @siatsfu

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

TACTILE

September 25 – October 4, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 26, 2026
THIS Gallery, Vancouver
@this_______________________

PLEASE TOUCH THE ART

THIS Gallery presents TACTILE, a group exhibition that asks visitors to break one of the most firmly established rules of the gallery: do not touch the art.

Co-curated by THIS Gallery founder Shannon Pawliw and Sophia Crompton, a fourth-year Art History student at McGill University and summer 2026 intern at THIS Gallery, TACTILE brings together seven artists selected from an open call that received submissions from 70 artists.
Throughout the exhibition, visitors are invited to hold, rub, turn, unzip, manipulate, lean against, embrace and play with the artworks. Rather than treating touch as a threat to the objects on display, TACTILE considers physical interaction as another way of understanding them.

The exhibition brings together works by Natasha Bakas, K8L35 (Kate MacDonald + Les Sears), Kate Metten, Anne Steves, Asma Sultana, WhiteFeather Hunter and Anna Dimoff. Working across painting, ceramics, textiles, sculpture, found objects and unconventional materials, the artists approach touch as a means of investigation, play, empathy, intimacy, memory, comfort and bodily awareness.
Together, these works complicate the distinction between touching an artwork and using it. They ask what happens when the carefully maintained distance between viewer and object disappears.
Touch is one of our earliest ways of understanding the world. We learn through weight, texture, resistance, softness, movement and physical contact. Yet in museums and galleries, this fundamental form of knowledge is usually removed from our encounter with art.
TACTILE restores it.

In a culture increasingly experienced through screens, the exhibition makes a case for direct physical experience and for encountering art not only with our eyes and intellect, but with our hands, our bodies and our curiosity.
Please touch the art.

@natasabakaart
@k8l35
@kate_metten
@annesteves_artist
@meetasultana
@astrodesia
@solid.proof

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🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸
Solstice-algia as NEW SUNS at @artengine has officially concluded, and my chapter in Ottawa has also come to a close.
🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

“When the Great Undoing first finds her, it does not go by this name—it does not go by a name at all. It arrives, instead, in a slow series of No’s—no, we are not dying; no, they are not dying; no, we are no more devastated now than we have been in the past. Words not said by her, of course, but for her, unleashed into the air she breathes, poured into the founts from which she drinks…

…So, when the Great Undoing finds her—this raging ball of fire descending from above, drawing nearer and nearer with each passing hour—she discovers within its approach, her own great big ball of rage. How dare? How fucking dare? It has been there all this time, has it not? Drawing nearer, at no greater speed than now, parked right outside the planet’s window. Who did this? Was it you? How dare you? How dare you, all this time, speak of anything but?…

…There is no alternative, said those burdened with a paucity of imagination, once. But, as I have learned in my time spent in this cryo-chamber—what has it been now; minutes? months? millennia?—there will always be alternatives...

…Such is the power of this plane on which I now exist, this kin-continuum, this layering of space-time and memory, of here-ness and now-ness and then-ness and if-ness all folded one over each other, paper-cranes of possibilities...”

Excerpts from “More Human,” the NEW SUNS text by @suyidavies

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸
Photos by John Finnigan-Lin
and Ming Wu (where watermarked).
The exhibition featured artworks (tagged) and an exclusive audio piece by NEW SUNS world co-builders @astrodesia @itsevagrant @kemi.craig @naominoumi @_em_bo_ @melanie.barnett.ceramics @krizzly.man @bengloberman.portfolio
NEW SUNS video by @artengine
🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

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"The Pussification of Biotech: Period Brain" by WhiteFeather Hunter.

In The Pussification of Biotech: Period Brain, menstrual blood is reclaimed as both origin and operator of knowledge production. This film captures the live cellular unfolding of primary tissue explanted directly from a menstrual cup and cultured in N2B27 medium with murine FGF and EGF for 44 hours. Under 40x magnification, time-lapse microscopy reveals the emergence of dendritic protrusions—evidence of early neuronal differentiation—rendering the so-called “period brain” not as myth, but as material intelligence. Produced during an artist research residency at Cultivamos Cultura (PT) in partnership with the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine, uLisboa, this work provocatively feminizes the sterile field of biotech. It invites viewers to witness regeneration as a menstrual praxis—subverting bioengineering norms through a bleeding, thinking dish.

#BioArt #FeministScience #MenstrualBlood #PeriodBrain #BiotechRevolution #ArtAndScience #CellularIntelligence #TissueCulture #Neurogenesis #SpeculativeBiotech #LiveMicroscopy #FeministBiotech #RegenerativeArt #biopolitics #cultivamoscultura

@astrodesia

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New Suns was a fascinating artistic journey with this diverse group of creators. Find out more about the Human+ world they imagined and come see the exhibition before June 21st.

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It’s finally up and open to the public. The New Suns exhibition includes this incredible work by @astrodesia Come find out more about her bio printer!

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I always knew there would only be three Conjuring Creativitys and whilst there’s a huge feeling of sadness now this project is over, I feel it’s the right time to move on with the new curatorial/teaching dream ….
meanwhile I’ll be updating the website whilst getting round to sharing a few more glimpses of this purposely non recorded embodied event ✨

Geraldine x

….

Shown here are stills from the last 5 films of the reel shown at Treadwells a couple of weeks ago …

Rosalind Fowler
Guardians of the Sun Door

Lila Moore
The 9th Altar in the Serpentine Field

Linsey Gosper
Diary of a Witch


Rosie Dahlstrom
‘Oh Ill Thief’


WhiteFeather Hunter
Homuncularium Basiliscus

Thankyou again so much to all the wonderful artists for trusting me with your films !!!

@rosalindfowler
@cybernetic_entities
@pulsing_animacy
@comfort_me_with_apples
@astrodesia

and to @the_art_traveller for being production support on the day ! ✨

#curatingmagic
#artistsshortfilm
#esotericconference
#conjuringcreativity3
#inhabitingesotericecologies

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Some really great shots of my work, Z-stack, from the Barely 50 exhibition (curated by Marta de Menezes) currently on at @cultivamoscultura in São Luís, Portugal. Thank you so much @avneree and @elizlit_art for this wonderful documentation! Some of the photos are mine, too (specific photo credits are in the comments).
Z-Stack is my cellular vocabulary book—a tactile, material archive of temporal microscopy, where each page becomes a frame in a slow animation of life. Composed from z-stacks of living tissue (menstrual stem cells differentiating into neuronal types) captured every two minutes via live cell microscopic imaging at the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine, this work portrays depth through layered image sequences that reveal the choreography of cells in motion, suspended between growth, stasis, and decay.
Bound with brass screw posts and encased in frosted pink plexiglass stained with ink, each vellum page flickers with ghosted traces of cellular time. Nestled in the centre of the die-cut tunnel book is a bioprinted clitoris in a petri dish, a speculative anatomy grown from feminist futurity. The larger tunnel book has a smaller companion flip book, which visitors can play with to generate their own stop-motion animation by hand. Z-stack is a speculative lexicon: a language of tissue, gesture, and transformation.
Huge thanks to @canada.council for funding my travel to Portugal to participate in this wonderful event!

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“Embodying the Bioprinter” @biolablisboa
by @astrodesia

After spending the last couple of weeks tweaking, tunning and hacking a bioprinter, this embodiment fealt really good!

#bioprinter #bioart #bioink #biomaterial

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Oh to bask in a bed of moss with frog-brethren.

Another (another!) project I've been a part of this year that I haven't posted much about is the New Suns Worldbuilding Lab hosted by Artengine in Ottawa, ON.

I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with this amazing group of artists over the past several months. New Suns opens at Artengine at 2 Daly Ave, Ottawa, ON June 7-20, 2025.

B l o g post coming soon about this work, "Both Ways of Life"

#ceramic #art #canadianart #canadianclay #claysculpture #frog #moss #artengine #newsuns

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NEW SUNS will be open at 67 Nicholas @ Artengine June 7th-20th and Visit us for our opening June 7th 12pm - 4pm for Doors Open Ottawa & 5pm - 10pm for Pique

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The first chapter of the New Suns Worldbuilding Lab is coming to a close.

From science fiction to social theory, New Suns brought together 8 artists to co-create visionary worlds that reimagine how we live, connect, and evolve. Guided by Nebula Award finalist @suyidavies, the lab began with a worldbuilding weekend and grew into a constellation of wondrous works.

Explore the futures imagined:
Exhibit runs June 7–21 at Artengine

Artist work pictured: @_em_bo_ & @naominoumi

#NewSuns #Worldbuilding #SciFiArt #SpeculativeFutures #ArtExhibit #Artengine

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