This year’s ninth exhibition of the Best Media Arts Graduation Projects Competition, organized jointly by the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Arts and Design in Wrocław, the WRO Art Center, and BWA Wrocław Contemporary Art Galleries, is a continuation of cooperation between universities with different models of media art education. The aim of the project is to share the experience of this field of teaching at eight public art academies in Poland: in Krakow, Warsaw, Szczecin, Łódź, Katowice, Poznań, Gdańsk, and Wrocław, as well as to promote the graduates of the academies. The exhibition is also one of the main components of the WRO 2023 Biennale.

This year, the competition exhibition returns to the Studio BWA Wrocław Gallery. This year’s exhibition will be entitled Mycorrhiza. Mycorrhiza in nature is mycelial hyphae that live in symbiosis with plant roots and increase the resistance of plants to disease. This process can be understood as both a communication strategy and a survival model – a symbiosis relationship between the faunal and fungi worlds. Fungi are sometimes pioneers in the reclamation of damaged environments, such as in the case of matsutake fungi, which Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing has written about. We propose to understand the metaphor of mycorrhiza in two ways – on the one hand, as a way of capturing the narrative of the Competition, which is underpinned by a model of competition. By constructing the exhibition and the relationships between the participants in the exhibition in the context of their works, we seek to highlight the nature of cohabitation and collaboration in one space. On the other hand, a mushrooming component is evident in the works presented in the exhibition. The conceptualism-referencing realizations (Klaudia Kasperska and Oleksandr Goliuk), despite their digital provenance, are contesting the new-media tradition; they are installations clearly inspired by biomorphic systems. Dreamy and psychedelic video realizations (Jan Kowal, Piotr Michalski, and Franek Warzywa) are presented amidst a rhizomatic mycelium structure in which unidentified drawing objects (Sonia Kujawa) circulate. And the ways of understanding and experiencing the world, a story about the calibration and limitations of our senses and perceptions (Malgorzata Wronska, Kacper Krajewski) are the glue of the mushroom construction of Mycorrhiza.