The
Artist
Paulina Mirowska
Lives and Works in
Warsaw
Visual artist, burned-out climate activist, educator. Born in 1987 in Warsaw, Poland. Graduate of the University of Arts in Poznań , majoring in Photography. She heads the Second Studio of Photography (together with Dr. Mariusz Filipowicz) and the Studio of Photography Basics at the Faculty of Graphics of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. A member of the Pracownia Wschodnia Association, the Program Council of the Pracownia Wschodnia Gallery, and the P.H.U. Sitex collective. She is interested in grassroots practices of self-organisation and resistance. She navigates the conceptual realm that exists both within and beyond the binary oppositions foundational to the construction of Western civilization (‘culture versus nature’ and ‘art versus science’). She employs various strategies – visual art, academic research, activist experience – to transcend, deconstruct and rethink these binaries, bringing seemingly heterogeneous fi elds of knowledge to life. Although her practice is based on abstract ideas, the artist always remains close to material reality, focusing on ways of understanding (and feeling) how parts of the ecosystem live and die and how they affect each other.
Projects
2024
Trophia
The "Trophia" project takes us back to the Precambrian era, when photosynthesis first occurred in the oceans. The central theme of the piece is chlorophyll, its sensitivity to light and the visualisation of the energy that gave rise to the first living cell and ultimately to everything that surrounds us.
The project was born out of a desire to understand what life is, in order to understand and confront the meaning of extinction. I started looking for the oldest mechanisms that determined the evolution of life on Earth. I was interested in the moment when the sun, a destructive force, became a life-giving resource through the evolution of photosensitivity. As a photographer, I was fascinated by the ability of plants to perform photosynthesis – to absorb, retain and create new value from solar energy.
The works attempt to capture, through visual language, the conditions on Earth that set the stage for the emergence of the life-giving primordial soup. For about 500 million years after the Earth formed as a planetary body, it was a lifeless period. I deconstructed the conditions that prevailed at that time – cosmic matter, water, electrical discharges, magnetic forces and solar energy photons. Photography was a pretext for imagining and experiencing these conditions, with my workshop, photography studio and theatre hall becoming my laboratory.
Paulina Mirowska
Fotofestiwal Lodz
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Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.
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