ArchaeaBot in SUPERNATURAL at Oulu Museum of Art

ArchaeaBot: A Post Climate Change, Post Singularity Life-form was shown at Oulu Museum of Art in Finland as part of SUPERNATURAL, where it was on view from 29 May to 17 October 2021. The exhibition brought together more than thirty international artists and examined how contemporary art responds to embodiment, ecological instability, and the changing relationship between human and non-human life.

That context suited ArchaeaBot closely. The work imagines a speculative life-form shaped by climate collapse and technological transformation, drawing on archaea as resilient organisms that can survive in extreme conditions. Within SUPERNATURAL, it sat alongside sculpture, video, and photography that asked what bodies might become, how nature may respond, and how technology alters the terms through which life is understood.

For May, this exhibition sharpened the wider questions at the centre of the practice. ArchaeaBot does not present technology as a solution or a spectacle. Instead, it uses robotics and speculative biology to ask what may endure, mutate, or be remade when environmental and technological systems have already changed the world beyond familiar human assumptions. The exhibition was developed from a concept by Nicole Fritz and curated in Oulu by Elina Vieru with Maximilian Letze.