Aljoscha

Aljoscha (Ukrainian: Альоша, romanized: Alosha; 1974 in Lozova, USSR, now Ukraine), born Oleksii Potupin (Ukrainian: Олексій Потупін), is a Ukrainian visual artist known for large scale conceptual installations, sculptures, interventions, paintings and drawings based on ideas of bioism, biofuturism, bioethics and bioethical abolitionism.

Beyond the new aesthetics of bioism, his prioritized bioethical and philosophical ideas are the eradication of suffering and the paradise engineering.

Bioism (or biofuturism) represents an attempt to develop new life forms and to create an aesthetic for the future of organic existence. Each artwork is regarded by the artist as a hypothetical living being — an expression of synthetic vitality, complexity, morphological multiplicity, and deviance. Bioism signifies a shift from reproductive to generative art: from representing existing biological forms to creating fundamentally new life worlds and alternative ontologies. This paradigm expands the concept of life by attributing evolutionary potential to inanimate matter and by opening a path toward a symbiosis of art, bioethics, and biotechnology.

In Aljoscha’s visionary projection of the future, living systems will merge with the everyday — from living furniture and architecture to interplanetary biospheres — offering the artistic possibility of shaping non-suffering life forms. Thus, Bioism appears not only as an aesthetic platform but also as an ethical manifesto of bioethical abolitionism — envisioning the transformation of museums into laboratories of biosensitive diversity and of art into a practical instrument for the responsible formation of future life.

He studied 2001-2002 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany (class of Prof. Konrad Klapheck) as well as 2006 at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria (class of Shirin Neshat).