From January 10 to March 10, 2025, the exhibition "On the Border of Worlds IV. Empire of Chlorophyll" will be available for viewing in the temporary exhibition hall of the Nature Education Center. Admission to the temporary exhibition is free.
Wystawa "Na pograniczu światów IV. Imperium chlorofilu"
The Jagiellonian University's Center for Environmental Education has the honor of inviting you to another temporary exhibition from the series "On the Border of Worlds." This is the fourth part of this extraordinary journey, entitled "Chlorophyll Empire."
The exhibition will be available for free viewing from 10.01.2025 to 09.02.2025.
Artists: Lena Achtelik, Bogusław Bachorczyk, Marta Bożyk, Rafał Borcz, Blanka Byrwa, Zuzanna Dolega Krzysztof Gil, Łukasz Huculak, Edyta Hul, Marcin Janusz, Anna Kołodziejczyk, Juliusz Kosin, Kamil Kukla, Paweł Matyszewski, Jarosław Modzelewski, Kamil Moskowczenko, Agata Nowosielska, Henryk Ożóg, Wojciech Ireneusz Sobczyk, Małgorzata Pawlak, Monika Polak, Paweł Sobczak, Irmina Staś, Sławomir Toman, Marcin Zawicki
The vernissage will take place on January 9, 2025 at 6:00 PM at:
Centre for Environmental Education, Jagiellonian University
ul. Gronostajowa 5, 30-387 Kraków
www.cep.uj.edu.pl
Curators:
Bartosz J. Płachno
Marcin Zawicki
Łukasz Huculak
Chlorophyll Empire
Imagine a planet without chlorophyll. The lands are dominated by the colors of weathering rocks. Green appears when copper compounds are decomposed. The oceans seem empty... but life exists. Some microorganisms draw energy from chemosynthesis, others by devouring their neighbors.
The production of chlorophyll is a revolution in the history of our planet, not only in terms of its color. Like every revolution, it required sacrifices. In this case, these were anaerobic organisms. The world of chlorophyll, photosynthesis and oxygen, i.e. the world of green, ended the domination not only of anaerobes, but also of autotrophs drawing energy from chemosynthesis. Some of these original green organisms were eaten by other single-cell organisms, but to avoid digestion they “lived” in the cells of their predators. The history of the world of chlorophyll is a story of symbiosis and the relationships between organisms that allowed life to reach the next levels of organization.
Today, when we eat plants, we simultaneously consume distant descendants of the first autotrophs who discovered chlorophyll and photosynthesis. Our blood cells contain haemoglobin, which resembles chlorophyll in structure. The world we know is based on an ancient symbiosis based on chlorophyll. The exhibition was dedicated to chlorophyll, i.e. the world dominated by plants, but none of the curators required the invited artists to create green paintings or installations. (Bartosz J. Płachno)
Cotton canvas, wooden loom, agar, plant pigments, all secured with dammar and framed in an oak frame. Without plants, it is impossible to think about art, especially easel painting. As its essence, plants were and are the content of representation. As the heroines of works of art, they oscillate between the ends of the spectrum: from extreme objectification to subjective independence. (...)
Contemporary culture increasingly seeks a non-human point of view. The holistic vision of the world from the area of folk beliefs and New Age philosophy seems to be gradually heading towards the area of science. One may be tempted to say that even a single representative of homo sapiens is in fact a conglomeration of the organism together with the intestinal microbiome and a few other creatures that together constitute a small ecosystem.
As part of nature, a representative of the world of living organisms, an artist, has in his gesture an energy enchanted innate to nature. The trace of a hand, the path of a brush, being an expression of a human limb, becomes an expressor of the entire path of evolution attributed to it, a gesture of all the paws, tentacles, cnidocytes and pseudopodia preceding it. The voice of the nuclear fusion of the sun responsible for the phenomenon of life, the voice of plants that transform photons rushing through space into nutritious sugar thanks to the magic of chlorophyll. (Marcin Zawicki).
