Fire and Flora, 2021. (As part of the group show - A Community of Sentient Beings) curated by Hugo Gromny and Wiola Ujazdowska.
Community of Sentient Beings is curated by Hugo Gromny and Wiola Ujazdowska who seek to create a space for multiple voices to come together, while reflecting on different ways of voicing, hearing and sensing. In this way, the exhibition will offer a space for various kinds of engagement, with an emphasis on the project’s processual and performative nature, by activating the space and exploring different ways of inhabiting it, transforming the museum into a space of connectivity.
Looking at our connection to the world as a community of sentient beings will allow us to open various paths of investigation, whether it be the relationship between human and nature, human and culture, or human and human. The term sentient being allows us to abandon historically charged definitions, to think of personhood and humans more broadly. At the core of the concept, is an interrogation of the historical and social usage of a category of human, which concerns whom and what we consider part of a community. Hafnarborg and its history also provide an interesting context for such investigation, as changing the function from a pharmacy and chemist laboratory can be seen as a symbolic shift from healing practices based on science, namely chemistry, towards the spiritual and cultural agency of art.
The artwork itself consists of five 60x45 oil paintings that were all painted as a series intended for the content of the exhibition.
Fire and flora, lyrical text: As Fire becomes Matter
Cyclical, circular – in motion. The layers of time collide and touch upon each other, drifting in and out like river streams. Veins of something that has been, or is yet to be born. All One, in the well of becoming.
Roots appearing on the surface, remnants of something that is lost and forgotten. Yet it is emerging, dwelling between the spaces, hiding in the land. These codes speak to the nature of the landscape, these codes speak to the man - who still worships both true and false realities. Fire is unleashed, it travels and grows. The tongue of the flame, burning red, riding through the forest. As the black field expands, something is appearing in the smoke.
