Flowers are giving up
Ines Karčáková
Corals are fading under the stress, insects are disappearing, flowers are suppressing their attractiveness, all set in the background while people lose their ability to anchor themselves in reality. What else are we willing to give up? How far does the bottom of our recklessness extend? All of these processes are happening at incredible speed as a desperate effort to appeal for help, as an answer to the geopolitical developments of the last 50 years.
The selection of photographs was taken in response to the rapid changes in nature. The main subject of my interest is the great decline of insects. Research has shown that flowers are giving up pollinators and evolving to be less attractive to them. They are evolving to self-pollinate, which would work in the short term, but may limit their ability to adapt to future environmental changes. Plants are undoing thousands of years of evolution in response to a phenomenon that has only existed for the last few decades.
The black and white photographs of insects are appropriated materials - an old large collection of negatives edited by me that I found in an antique shop. The other shots were taken gradually and are my own.
Ines Karčáková (*1993) is multimedia artist from Slovakia, based in Prague, Czech Republic. Her interest is in topics such as light, time, space, and disturbance of their mutual interrelationships.
She reflects on the qualities of the medium of photography through video installations in the space, which are often covered by appropriated visual material, in the long term. She is primarily interested in the changing specificity of photography - its original uniqueness is rapidly changing and today we can speak of it in terms of instability, ambiguity and untrustworthiness.
Recently, she has primarily focused on research in astrophotography, among on cosmic microwave background, or on the boundary between the rough telescope record and the aestheticized photography serving to popularize astronomy itself. Now, she is forming an arc over the schematic and romanticized visions of cosmic distances, coming back to much more terrestrial problems. Her current themes are the misbalance between the pace of technological development and its actual understanding, or the consequences of long-term neglect of environmental problems. She had several exhibitions in Slovakia, Czech Republic, but also abroad - for example in Budapest, New York or Düsseldorf.
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