Talk in connection with Life Itself

Carsten Höller has been trained as an agricultural entomologist and holds a doctorate (1988) and a habilitation (1993) in chemical ecology from the University of Kiel, Germany. After postdoc research in Europe and the USA, he decided to quit science and become an artist in 1993.

His work has been shown internationally over the last two decades, including in solo exhibitions at Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2015); Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary–Augarten, Vienna, Austria (2014); the New Museum, New York, USA (2011); Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany (2011); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2010); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2008); MASS MoCA, North Adams, USA (2006); Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London, UK (2006); Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille, France (2004); Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2000).

Jami Weinstein is the founding director of The Critical Life Studies Research Group at Linköping University. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy (2005: CUNY Grad Center, NY) and a doctorat in Histoire des Techniques (2007: EHESS, Paris). Her research includes such articles and chapters as: “Vital Ethics: On Life and In/difference,” “Posthumously Queer,” “Transgenres and the Plane of Gender Imperceptibility,” “Transgenres and the Plane of Language, Species, and Evolution,” “A Requiem to Sexual Difference: A Response to Luciana Parisi’s ‘Event and Evolution,’” “Anthropocene Hipsters and the Critical Theory Apocalypse,” “Cruising Dystopia: Queerfeminist Futurities and the Anthropocene,” “Fatal Attraction: Philology, Epistemic Politics, and Obsessive Conceptual Disorder,” “and “The Viral Politics and the Epigenetic Warfare of The New Wild West.”

She has also co-edited two volumes, Inhuman Rites and Posthumous Life and Deleuze and Gender, and two special journal issues “Anthropocene Feminisms” for the journal philoSOPHIA, and “Tranimalities” for the Transgender Studies Quarterly. She is currently working on her Swedish Research Council project “Vital Signs: Life, Theory, and Ethics in an Age of Global Crisis” which will result in a monograph called Vital Ethics: On Life and Indifference, and is completing her first monograph, Vital Ontologies and the Posthumous Life Sciences. Weinstein is the series editor (with Claire Colebrook and Myra Hird) of The Critical Life Studies book series on Columbia University Press.