Interface

For its 2024 season, the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego celebrates the region as a hub of boundary pushing innovation in both art and the life sciences. Interface, the collective title for the 2024/2025 exhibition season, invites audiences to consider how art can mediate, translate, and expand the relationship between humans and the science of everyday life.

In addition to ICA San Diego’s annual NextGen exhibition celebrating local emerging talent, the Interface season will consist of six exhibitions spread over ICA’s two campuses in Balboa Park and Encinitas. As always, there is no admission to the museum and ICA hosts free monthly public C You Saturday! events with special access to artist talks, exhibition tours, food and music.

Rather than searching for points of intersection between art and the life sciences, the exhibitions that define Interface offer an opportunity for continuous exchange. The Winter/Spring exhibitions by Turkish born, SanDiego based artist Dr. Pinar Yoldas (ICA Central) and the Danish art collective SUPERFLEX (ICA North) engage in conversations about where the human ends and the nonhuman begins. The artists’ various projects consider how we might build the future in collaboration with other species and imagine a world beyond the Anthropocene.

The second half of the season offers solo exhibitions by Rafael LozanoHemmer, Nathalie Miebach, Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez Delgado, and Melissa Walter. For her presentation at ICA North, San Diego based Melissa Walter will interpret the evolution of DNA identification technology and its influence on the criminal justice system through works on paper and experimental animation. Walter’s exhibition will be accompanied by Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez Delgado’s first solo museum presentation in the continental US. Through his experimental sculpture, Rodríguez Delgado assesses the techno optimism of 1980s America by creating mobile survival systems to navigate the future challenges facing our planet.

In Balboa Park, the ICA Central mezzanine will be the site of celebrated Mexican Canadian artist Rafael Lozano Hemmer’s interactive installation, Remote Pulse (2019), which will connect museum visitors to their counterparts at the Centro Cultural Tijuana via the sensation of a virtual pulse. An exhibition by Boston based Nathalie Miebach will occupy the gallery space, and will include woven sculptures and wall installations based on scientic data. Using meteorological, observational, and anecdotal information, Miebach has devised her own visual language to foreground the human relationship to data in her meticulously researched practice.