4.02-30.04.2022
SIC! gallery BWA Wrocław, Poland
Curator: Mika Drozdowska
What kind of traces are we leaving behind? What consequences of human ambition and egotism will our descendants suffer?
It is the Dominika Kulczyńska’s protest against the cultural and social practice of measuring the value of our lives by means of the number of traces we leave behind on our planet after we die. It is also an exceptional project aiming to expose the carbon footprint left in the process of production and organization of a contemporary art exhibition.
In 2020, the Kingdom exhibition was displayed in the SIC! gallery windows. It was a vision of the world after the Age of Man, a metaphor of downfall and end, but also of rebirth. The concept was an expression of artists reacting to the experience of the initial months of the global pandemic. It was also a reflection on the rapidly transforming planet, resulting from climate change. One of the windows featured a new life sprouting in weirdly-shaped pieces of porcelain, at first glance resembling plant roots or mycelium seeds. Some were stark white, others smudged with plastic left on the ground. The new organisms growing from the soil bore signs of the past, like mineral records – trace fossils remaining after the kingdom of man.
A year later, in his very important book Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, David Farrier asked the uncomfortable question of the legacy of the Anthropocene. What kind of traces are we leaving behind? What consequences of human ambition and egotism will our descendants suffer? How are we going to be presented in the myths and tales of the future generations, still breathing the carbon dioxide we produced?
