Sister Sylvester
New York, NY
Sister Sylvester is an artist and amateur microbiologist based in New York and Istanbul. Her work has been called ‘genuinely subversive’ by Time Out NY; ‘original’ by New York Times; ‘pulse-raising’ by Exeunt Magazine, ‘perplexing’ by Theaterscene, ‘apocalyptic’ by artforum, and an ‘intimate, off-kilter, queer artistic orgasm’ by Life Magazine, Greece.
She works at the place where science and technology meet politics and history. Her installation and film work includes ‘Drinking Brecht’ which premiered at IDFA ‘24. In collaboration with Deniz Tortum she created the VR documentary Shadowtime, (’23) which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and continues to tour to festivals including IDFA, GIFF, and Thessaloniki Film Festival; and the film Our Ark which premiered at IDFA (’21) and has screened at festivals internationally. In her live work she creates visual essays and books that become performances, spatial narratives that play with spoken and written text to create communal reading experiences. Most recently Constantinopoliad, with a live-score by Nadah El Shazly, was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation, and premiered at National Sawdust in NYC (‘23) and played at Onassis Stegi and the Internationaal Theater of Amsterdam in 2024; and The Eagle and The Tortoise, which premiered at Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, as a part of IDFA On Stage (‘22) and at Under The Radar Festival NYC 2024. She is a current resident at ONX Studio; a 2019 MacDowell Fellow; an alumnus of the Public Theater New Works program and CPH:DOX lab. She teaches a bio-art class, “The School of Genetically Modified Theater,” at Colorado College, and has also taught and lectured at MIT, Princeton, UCCS, Columbia University, and Boğaziçi, Istanbul.
sister sylvester, Ghost Genes, 2024. Still from moving image. Image courtesy the artist
Ghost Genes
Sister Sylvester creates visual essays and expanded documentaries, at the place where technology and science meet politics and history. She works across performance, film, and new media.
Artist BioGhost Genes is an augmented-reality sound work that uses bone-conduction transducers. It’s a performance that becomes a surreal encounter with the sounds and stories of synthetic biology, and ghosts from the history of genetics. It is part of a larger series of performance works where Sister Sylvester brings the tools of biotech into the bodies of the audience.
This series began in 2018 with a hat that was a costume at Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, and hadn’t been washed since the 1930s. Sylvester extracted the DNA of both humans and microbes from the hat, and their genomes have become the basis for works exploring the emerging technologies of synthetic biology, and their implications for our bodies and lives.
Ghost Genes, the second work in the series, uses transducers to create a work that happens directly in the body of the audience. The installation can only be heard if the audience create a line of conduction between an object and their skulls, using their own bones (e.g. touching an elbow to a table or wall, and the bony part of the hands to their cheekbones), turning the skull into a resonant cavity where the audio plays, and giving the impression of sounds and words that come from within their own head.
The audio experience is accompanied by an interactive exhibition of artist books that explore the relationship between the metaphors of DNA as a ‘code’, a ‘book of life’, and the place of fascism in the history of genetics.