Yirrkala Dhunba

FUTURE MANIFESTOS
KJØPMANNSGATA UNG KUNST, 9. APRIL  – 31. MAI 2026
Åpning: 9. april 2026 kl.18.00
Kuratorer: Zane Cerpina, Espen Gangvik

Indigenous Genomic Adaptation [2023–]

Indigenous Genomic Adaptation is a work about the right to survive the Anthropocene—the age of catastrophes—on Indigenous terms.

It examines how Indigenous futures are dominated by the language of biotechnology under conditions of climate collapse. I begin from a simple concern: when ecological crisis intensifies, “adaptation” is often framed as a technical story—measurable, improvable, and governable. In that story, the future body becomes infrastructure: something to be designed to endure what extractive systems have produced. My work does not propose biotechnology as a solution. It stages biotechnology as contested terrain—a field of authority where survival is narrated, negotiated, and sometimes quietly determined in advance.

The project takes the aesthetics of genomics seriously, not as scientific representation but as cultural power. Genomic imagery is one of the most persuasive visual languages of our era. It offers the fantasy of total legibility: that life can be rendered as code and therefore rewritten. In Indigenous Genomic Adaptation, I borrow this language to expose its force. I use monumental scale to echo the way institutions monumentalize “innovation” and “resilience” through compelling images that look definitive, clean, and future-ready. Scale becomes a pressure: it amplifies the feeling of certainty. At the same time, the work refuses to deliver the certainties it seems to promise. What appears as code does not resolve into instruction. What appears as evidence does not become proof. This is not a failure of the work—it is the work’s ethical position.

The central tension in the project is between two impulses that are often collapsed into one: the desire to survive, and the desire to control. Climate collapse produces real urgency. But urgency can also become an alibi for interventions that treat Indigenous life as a site of optimization. I am interested in how quickly “saving” becomes “editing,” and how quickly “adaptation” becomes a governance project. I work with these questions through image and expectation—through the viewer’s encounter with what appears technically credible, and the ethical costs hidden inside that credibility.

The work draws on the look and behaviour of data—systemic patterning, mutation-like drift, repetition and breakdown—without becoming legible as sequence, diagram, or instruction. The technology element is not that the work “explains science,” but that it shows how technological cultures make futures believable through the aesthetics and behaviours of data. In other words, it is about technological aesthetics as power, not technology as demonstration. It looks like technoscience, behaves like a system, and refuses to resolve into proof—so the viewer confronts their own impulse to trust technical-looking images. 

The work’s ethical boundary is part of its meaning. I refuse to use community genomic datasets or to produce functional genetic claims. This refusal is not an avoidance of rigor; it is a refusal of extraction. It is a way of insisting that Indigenous futures cannot be reduced to raw material for technological imagination, and that sovereignty must include the right not to be rendered into data. The project therefore operates as ethical friction: it borrows the authority of technoscientific aesthetics in order to make that authority visible, interruptible, and accountable. It asks the viewer to notice how credibility is manufactured—and to notice their own willingness to trust it.

Ultimately, Indigenous Genomic Adaptation is a work about the right to imagine survival on Indigenous terms. It refuses the two dominant narratives that often surround Indigenous futures: the romantic fantasy of timelessness and the fatalistic fantasy of disappearance. Against both, I insist on futurity as an active space—complex, negotiated, and culturally grounded. The work does not offer a future solution. It offers a future question: when climate pressure and technological acceleration converge, will Indigenous life be treated as an editable problem to be managed, or as a sovereign continuum of knowledge, relation, and responsibility that cannot be optimized without loss?