Amram’s project brings these issues to the fore within the context of an art museum. In this space, which looks like a cross between a home environment, basement lab and a DIY workshop, complete with various tools, the gaze zooms in and out on the biohacker’s world. A microscope allows us to see cyanobacteria (a kind of bacteria that produce oxygen photosynthesis) found by the artist on her home window, and parameciums (a genus of unicellular organisms); the process of cell division demonstrated in a microwave oven; a shell-encrusted shoe that she found on the beach in Haifa; seemingly radioactive uranium glass; volcanic rock; and hybridized objects of her own design. Hybridization, transformation, hacking, and revealing the invisible appear to be the guiding metaphors for our experience of the show.

It is not only microorganisms that Hila Amram has hacked and invited into the gallery space. For the Herzliya Museum project, she hacked her own life and incorporated it into the show. This includes the soundtrack of her studio (where she listens to the NTS radio – an online radio station) as well as her personal life story. Her father, an artist himself, who was diagnosed with a serious kidney disease, is represented in the form of the jacket that he used to wear while working at his studio, in the basement. The show also references the fact that she herself was able to have her children only thanks to the advances in biology and genomics.

The enigmatic title of the exhibition – 9 – refers us to the gene-engineering kit CRISPR/Cas9; to the nine months of pregnancy and the mystery of cells division; and may also be read as a numeric code name that serves to conceal identity and maintain anonymity, as is the wont of biohackers around the world.

The exhibition is generously supported by Outset Contemporary Art Fund, and the Polish Institute, Tel Aviv.

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