Diana Lelonek

Diana Lelonek - Sedum Acre L. On Plastic Bottle (PET)

Técnica: GICLÉE PRINTING ABOUT HAHNEMÜHLE PHOTO RAG

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.

 

Series of photographs depicting a collection of found objects covered with moss and plants. “Center for the Living Things” is a research para-institution founded in 2016, in order to examine, collect and disseminate knowledge about new forms of humanotic nature. All items gathered in the Institute’s collection are abandoned objects, used and no longer needed products – waste from human overproduction, which have become the natural environment for many living organisms. The specimens were found in illegal waste dumps, where the transgression of man-made objects and plant tissues takes place. These hybrids of plants and artificial objects are difficult to classify, as they are simultaneously animate and inanimate. In the process of overproduction, the incessant demand for constant updating of the owned goods is the reason why most unnecessary products seem to be out of control. “Center for the Living Things” aims to describe the mechanisms that appear in the sphere of rejection and uselessness. In this area, products are no longer tools used by people. Products participate in almost all processes occurring in the biosphere, so we cannot definitively separate economic or social processes from so-called natural processes.