Past Labels: The place Artwork, Science, and Philosophy Collide
Isabel Englebert’s trajectory is something however standard. With an instructional basis that spans economics, communication, design, and neuroscience, the Argentine conceptual artist and researcher has emerged as a novel voice exploring the intersections of id, expertise, and philosophical inquiry. Her observe is rooted in rigorous analysis and a drive to interrogate the frameworks that govern human self-perception.
Englebert’s numerous coaching features a diploma in Communications Sciences, design course at Central Saint Martins in London, jewellery research at L’École Van Cleef & Arpels in Paris, and coursework in Medical Neurosciences at Duke College. Most lately, she accomplished postgraduate research in Modern Artwork Applied sciences on the College of Buenos Aires and took part within the GlogauAIR Berlin residency . Her recognition by Forbes as certainly one of “35 beneath 35” underscores her rising affect inside the international up to date artwork circuit. Her investigations have been printed in specialised mediums comparable to Arte Al Día. She was lately accepted to SFSIA 2025 in Paris on the Centre des Récollets and to the Grasp in Arts & Imaginative and prescient at Université Sorbonne, whose school contains Nicolas Bourriaud, Claire Fontaine, and others.
For over a decade, Englebert has cultivated an interdisciplinary studio observe that pulls from the disciplines of science, expertise, philosophy, and visible tradition. Her early profession in company strategic communication offered her with a world lens and an analytical strategy that continues to tell her work right now. This structured basis helps the conceptual rigor that underpins every of her artworks. Whether or not creating an set up, a video piece, or an experimental collection, she approaches each resolution with a way of function anchored in analysis. In her view, every medium, every materials, and each aesthetic selection should carry conceptual weight and intentionality, forming a coherent dialogue with the themes she investigates.
The core of Englebert’s creative inquiry revolves round id—its building, fragmentation, and reconfiguration in up to date contexts marked by genetic engineering and technological saturation. Rising from a background formed by conventional values and a prescribed path {of professional} success, she started to query the very mechanisms that outline particular person subjectivity. Her observe grew to become an introspective device to decode the intricate social, psychological, and technological components that form the self. Via this lens, she investigates how a lot of our id is actually ours, and to what extent it’s formed—and even fabricated—by exterior programs of affect.
Isabel Englebert: Architect of Invisible Identities
Englebert’s work is deeply self-referential, typically utilizing her personal physique and biology as each topic and medium. Her explorations vary from genome sequencing to brainwave recordings, underscoring her dedication to confronting id at its most intimate stage. Within the ongoing collection Beginner Gods, Englebert makes use of her personal genetic information, obtained by means of a saliva pattern, to problem notions of selfhood and authorship. Twenty-three plexiglass items, every engraved with a synthesis of certainly one of her chromosome pairs, invite viewers to bodily manipulate and reorder her genetic code. The general public, subsequently, turns into a stand-in for the scientist—and even the divine—reconstructing id by means of subjective selections. This interactive set up has been exhibited at main establishments, together with The Bass Museum and the Nationwide Museum Ferreyra, and offered on the Biohacking Congress in Texas.
Equally compelling is her video set up from the Presence of the Absence collection, a mission rooted in neuroscientific collaboration with an MIT lab. Right here, Englebert engages with the phenomenon of afterimages to create a poetic analogy between visible notion and reminiscence. The collection blends AI, cyanotypes, sculpture, and video to discover the lingering imprints left by absent stimuli—each within the mind and in private expertise. One of many standout works from this physique of analysis was showcased in Instances Sq. in 2024, cementing its relevance inside the public discourse round reminiscence, notion, and digital illustration. Her utility of cyanotype—an early photographic course of activated by daylight—provides one other conceptual layer by echoing the trace-based nature of reminiscence itself.
One other vital work, It took me 4 months, 9 days and 23 hours to finish 2 km with a pen, pushes the boundaries of endurance and conceptual minimalism. On this piece, a single ballpoint pen is used to inscribe a steady textual content throughout a 10-meter scroll of paper, suspended all through the gallery house. The work interrogates the connection between performance and essence—posing the query: what stays of an object, or an individual, as soon as its meant function has been exhausted?
Drawing on BIC’s declare {that a} pen can write as much as two kilometers, Englebert transforms a secular industrial benchmark right into a profound metaphor for existential inquiry. Via acts of obsessive repetition, she confronts the invisible labor embedded in meaning-making. This piece was finalist within the Arte Laguna Prize and exhibited in Arsenale Nord, in Venice, in 2024.
Tracing the Edge Between the Natural and the Digital
A lot of Englebert’s latest observe is formed by a fascination with how media, hyperconnectivity, and synthetic intelligence alter the method of self-construction. Her collection Who’s J.Doe? brings this into sharp reduction, synthesizing genome maps from nameless human DNA samples sourced from the NIH’s GenBank. The result’s a speculative determine—a hybrid entity that challenges the boundaries between individuality and anonymity. Right here, Englebert invokes the surreal as a way to unsettle standard notions of id. The viewer is confronted with a paradox: a portrait of somebody who doesn’t exist, but consists solely of actual, organic information. On this work, she addresses the collective facets of id, asking how a lot of ourselves is actually singular, and the way a lot is statistically inevitable.
Her studio observe depends on an intricate stability between instinct and evaluation. Ideas start not with quick execution however with extended intervals of theoretical improvement. Concepts are dissected, documented, questioned, and reshaped till they’re prepared for materials translation. Parallel to this conceptual incubation, Englebert conducts experiments with varied media—testing scales, volumes, colours, and shapes. She refers to this section as “adjudication,” a time period that captures the deliberative course of by means of which materials selections are justified. Every ingredient is chosen solely after it proves itself able to carrying the conceptual weight required by the mission.
An instance of this methodology might be discovered within the Solutio collection, the place she works along with her personal used clothes, integrating symbols of private historical past with bio-data comparable to brainwaves and genetic sequences. The clothes are altered and reconstructed to precise themes associated to the feminine expertise and Jungian interpretations of individuation. Right here, Englebert explores how id—significantly feminine id—is a layered building formed by each inside and exterior forces. Via the transformation of acquainted objects into websites of that means, she creates a symbolic vocabulary that speaks to each private narrative and common inquiry.
Isabel Englebert: The Self as a Laboratory
In Englebert’s inventive world, the artist just isn’t merely a maker however a form of researcher—and even alchemist—working on the intersection of disciplines. Her studio turns into a hybrid house, one half laboratory and one half philosophical atelier, the place every paintings is an experiment designed to problem assumptions in regards to the human situation. Drawing on figures like Duchamp, Kosuth, and Eduardo Kac, she aligns herself with a conceptual custom that values the method of inquiry over aesthetic ornament. Her affinity for Yoko Ono additionally reveals a performative and poetic sensitivity, particularly evident in her long-duration works and participatory installations. These influences inform a observe that prioritizes questioning as a lot as decision.
Her obsession with epistemological limits—what can really be identified—fuels her drive to blur the boundaries between science and artwork. This inquiry is not only theoretical; it takes materials kind by means of prolonged analysis, skilled consultations, and technical experimentation. Whether or not sourcing information from MIT labs or translating philosophical frameworks into bodily objects, she immerses herself in every topic till the idea finds its pure expression. This strategy imbues her works with each mental density and visible resonance. She refuses to accept surface-level symbolism, insisting as an alternative on artworks that carry the complete weight of their inquiries.
Presently, Englebert is engaged on her first e book, a science fiction novel that weaves collectively her main analysis themes: synthetic intelligence, feminism, genetics, and id. Like her artworks, the novel guarantees to navigate the liminal areas between the true and the speculative, between empirical truth and philosophical risk. Whereas her visible artwork captures questions in object kind, the novel permits her to stretch these questions into narrative time. In each endeavors, she continues to discover the complexities of what it means to be a self in a world the place even that idea is topic to reinvention.
