DIGITAL LAND(E)SCAPE
13 - 30 Nov 2019
Opening Night | Thursday 14 Nov, 6pm–8pm
Live Drawing Performance | opening night from 6:30pm
The exhibition is supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Zuza Banasinska
The exhibition is a set of tutorials, offering a critical ’didactic’ of approaching nature through digital interface. It operates through tensions between the idyllic representations of nature and its inherent artificiality. Through three projections of ’How to Meditate with Nature’, the viewer is immersed in the world of digital landscapes. Each video corresponds to a different space of meditation: home, outside, work. Yet all of them emphasise the non-specificity of the representations of nature, guiding the viewer towards a place that does not exist.
The videos are paired with "How to Grow a Tree", a drawing made by following the cursor in a YouTube tutorial on how to create a tree in a 3D graphics program. The visual chaos of the drawing is to contrast the idyllic landscapes of the videos, adding a certain tension to the „meditations".
’How to Meditate with Nature’ is a video referencing the availability of self improvement and quick fix meditations online, inspired by the visual style of software tutorials. Drawing on Taoist philosophy of unification of the body and mind, I created an environment where the virtual and the real have merged, where sensual experience and internal states are visualized by the objective representations of interface. The virtual world loses its virtuality (or the real one its realness), when we can't contrast them. In a time of ecological crisis, the interface becomes an illusion of control.
The other work is „How to Grow a Tree”, which is a drawing performance made by following the cursor in a YouTube tutorial on how to create a tree in a 3D graphics program. The movement of the human hand is here the creating, yet dominating force, exercising its power to conjure up a tree in only 20 minutes. Through the materialization of a virtual process, the purely physical aspect of constructing virtual reality, and, especially, virtual nature, is emphasized.
What remains when the mimetic quality of representation of nature is removed? Could the act of peeking through the surface of representation reveal anything about our relationship with nature?
Zuza Banasinska (1994, Warsaw, Poland) Graduated from the Graphics department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, Poland. In 2017-2018 she also studied at the Universität der Künste in Berlinie, in the class of Hito Steyerl. Currently she is studying at “Resolution”, a Moving Image Master at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. Received distinctions at such festivals as “Młode Wilki” in Szczecin, “File Festival” in Sao Paulo, “Transmission Festival” in Kassel/Karslruhe/Warsaw, “Nodocs” in Caracas and others. She participated in art residencies, such as “Heima” in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland or “Dům Umění Mesta Brna” in the Czech Republic. Her works have been shown in many galleries, project spaces and museums around the world. She predominantly works in the medium of experimental film. She lives and works in Amsterdam.
IMAGES | Zuza Banasinska, How to meditate with nature, film still, 2017 | Zuza Banasinska, exhibition landscape visualization, 2018 | Courtesy the artist.