The Work of Art in the Age of Biological Reproduction

This paper examines how biological processes are repurposed to resist capitalist systems of control by feminist and femme-identifying bioartists who work with living matter. These artists confront the commodification of life, care, and labor by turning the tools of bioproduction toward poetic, embodied, and relational interventions. Drawing from Silvia Federici’s critique of reproductive labor as foundational to capitalist exploitation, I argue that reclaiming biological reproduction as artwork directly subverts these systems of power.

Reimagining Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction for the biocapitalist present, I propose a theory of the artwork in the age of biological reproduction. Whereas mechanical reproduction dilutes an artwork’s aura through replication, contemporary bioart engages reproduction itself—growth, mutation, cellular division—as both medium and critique.

I examine a range of bioart practices, including Margherita Pevere’s Wombs, with its leaking organs contaminating multispecies environments, and Marta de Menezes’s Immortality for Two, which turns cell reproduction into a meditation on intimacy and interdependence. These works exemplify how fem(me)inist bioart materializes resistance by exposing the entanglements of biotechnology, gender, and capital.

Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Federici, Haraway, and Lewis, among others, this paper positions fem(me)inist bioart as a new avant-garde—a practice that resists extraction and control by insisting on care, decay, co-creation, and nonlinearity. By turning reproduction itself into a site of aesthetic and political intervention, these artists challenge dominant logics of authorship and labor—confronting the violent conditions under which biological life is rendered intelligible, governable, and profitable.