Chris Fite-Wassilak will write a series of experimental texts and essays using a method he describes as microbial—an art criticism that absorbs the metaphoric and descriptive properties of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms. Microbes are active, constantly searching, highly adaptable organisms that permeate everything. In microbes’ ability to cultivate invisible growths, create self-sustaining economies, and make symbiotic relationships with other organisms, Fite-Wassilak locates a form of interpretation that necessitates the decentralizing of anthropomorphic notions of selfhood and patterns of growth. His writing feeds off these microbial tendencies metaphorically and literally, highlighting art practices that address ecological and environmental issues while paying particular attention to artworks that engage unusual and unofficial channels for visibility, growth, and/or movement—art, in other words, that exists in and of the fringe.
Chris Fite-Wassilak is a writer, critic, and editor born in Atlanta and based in London. He is a contributing editor of ArtReview and a regular contributor to art-agenda, Art Monthly, Art Papers, Camera Austria, and frieze; his writing has also appeared in Afterall, Apollo, Art + Australia, Artforum, Circa, FlashArt International, Rhizome, RA Magazine, The Serving Library, and Tate Etc. He is the author of a book of essays, Ha-Ha Crystal (Copy Press, 2016), and a book of collected interviews, The Artist in Time: A Generation of Great British Artists (Herbert Press, 2020). He has written monograph essays on the work of John Carson (AVA Public, 2021), Imogen Stidworthy (Netwerk Aalst, 2019), Aki Sasamoto (White Rainbow, 2018), Matt Calderwood (Baltic and De La Warr Pavilion, 2015), and Ruth Proctor (Hollybush Gardens, 2015), among others.