Ania Dabrowska and Dr Bronwyn Parry

Ania Dabrowska
- Born in Poland in 1973 and lives in London.
- Works with photography, installation, text, sound and video.
- Interested in the impact that bringing together different registers of time and space and different cultural identities might have on each other when re-configured in a context of new work.
- Her project are often socially engaging and use participatory and collaborative methodologies.

Dr Bronwyn Parry
- Dr Bronwyn Parry is an economic and cultural geographer.
- Her primary interests lie in investigating the way human-environment relations are being re-cast by technological, economic and regulatory changes.
- Her interests include the rise and operation of the life sciences industry, informationalism, the commodification of life forms, post humanism, bioethics and systems for knowing, disciplining and governing nature.

Mind Over Matter
- Mind over matter is a science-art collaboration.
- About 12 brain donors, aged between 84 - over a 100, donating to try and find a cure for dementia.
- Understanding the scientific basis of dementia entails undertaking research on human brain tissue from people who were and were not effected by the disease.
- The exhibition element to mind over matter shows what happens behind the doors of brain bank labs to help rehabilitate and celebrate the practice of bodily donation in the public imagination.
- The exhibition works through issues relating to autonomy, the legacy of gifting, and the brave new world of biological re-modelling.
- The authors of the project met some of Britain's oldest prospective brain donors who agreed to be photographed and interviews about their lives and involvement in brain research.
- Drawing on themes of memory, death, the transience of the body and ageing, the artist uses the labyrinth-like exhibition site to evoke a phenomenological experience of what it might feel like to lose one's memory.
- Ania Dabrowska inter weaves photographic portraits, appropriated archival and medical photographs, projections, sound narratives and scientific artefacts to present a layered contemplation about the nature of memory loss, and to trace the new lives that the brains take on after the donors death.
- In reflecting on why bodily donations has always been a strictly anonymous activity, the authors explore what the ethical, psychological, religious and social implications are for donors, their families and researchers in re-negotiating the historical relationship between anonymity, objectivity and the impartiality of science.