In a Grain of Wheat, Cultivating Ancient Culture in Seed DNA

Wafaa Bilal  |  Visual Arts  |  2020  |  Iraq
Stewarding leading-edge biological archiving practices through a radical creative lens, this interdisciplinary new-media art project restores the Winged Bull of Nineveh, or "lamassu" – a 2,700 year-old Mesopotamian monument ravaged by the iconoclastic violence of ISIS in 2015 – back into global memory, saving high resolution 3D-scans in the DNA of Iraqi wheat seeds to splice civilizational origins with post-cultural planetary futures.