Diana Lelonek

Diana Lelonek - S/T (from the Barborka series)

Técnica: Collage on paper

Biografía del Artista: Diana Lelonek is a Polish contemporary artist, born in 1988 in Poznan. She graduated from the Faculty of Multimedia Communication at the Poznan University of Art, where she studied photography, and subsequently obtained her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at the same university. She currently works at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Lelonek is engaged in exploring the relationships between humans and other species. Her projects are critical responses to the processes of overproduction, unlimited growth, and our approach to the environment. She uses photography, living matter and found objects to create works that are interdisciplinary and often appear at the interface between art and science. Lelonek’s work has been exhibited in several international biennials, festivals and group exhibitions, including the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art in Oldenburg, the Kunstraum Niederösterreich in Vienna, the Temporary Gallery in Cologne, the Tallinn Art Hall, the Culturescapes Festival in Basel, the Musee de l’Elysee in Lausanne, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Kunstmuseum Bonn and the Tinguely Museum in Basel. Through her work, Lelonek invites the public to question their relationship to the natural world and to consider new forms of coexistence. In her work, she addresses themes such as biodiversity, deforestation, urbanization and climate change, exploring how these phenomena affect ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.

Diana Lelonek presents a series of collages made in collaboration with the Silesian Museum. Archival photographs from the early days of mining in Silesia were combined with current photographs of defunct Silesian mines, contemporary and archival photographs of glaciers, as well as drawings and photographs from old books on botany, biology and geology. The collages combine various periods and histories: of local communities, ancient coal forests, great horsetails and mosses, and contemporary endangered ecosystems. For all of them, a given moment is decisive for the continuation of the local community and its deep transgeological connections between species. Here, deep history and eras of humans and non-humans merge, creating a closed and complex cycle between two distant epochs of the great species extinction, intertwined in the process of coal mining and burning. Barbórka is a project that both addresses the mining traditions of Silesia and shows how nature is reborn. “For me, collages also have a private, personal dimension, because I myself come from Dabrowa Górnicza and grew up in the industrial landscape of the Silesian Voivodeship. The collages also feature fragments of the industrial architecture of the Katowice steelworks, where my parents worked. After the collapse of the Polish People's Republic, the steelworks were privatised and many people lost their jobs. Neoliberal capitalism caused many tragedies among the local community in my region. The current challenge of the upcoming energy transformation is also not planned responsibly, without taking into account the interests of both local communities and the ecosystem.” Diana Lelonek