Gints Gabrāns

Gints Gabrāns is one of the most prominent Latvian artists of the 1990s generation. In creating his installations, video works and internet art projects, Gabrāns takes an interdisciplinary approach to his visual research subjects, combining insights gleaned from the exact sciences with free artistic fantasies.  

In his mixed media installation “FOOOD:2050” the artist ponders how to overcome global food shortages resulting from the increasing population of the world, offering a utopian solution based on artistically scientific research. Gabrāns’ installation encourages viewers to think about how our lives would change if we injected the human body with specially adapted cellulose-consuming bacteria, which would enable us to eat wood and paper. As with any innovation, this could have both military and domestic uses. In offering such a fantastic plan for our survival, Gabrāns merely poses a rhetorical question about the benefits and risks to civilisation of “wood eating” bacteria. Each viewer can make their own further futurological forecasts. 

FOOOD: 2050. 2014. – 2020.