Info

Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
Faculty of Media Art
3D and Virtual Occurrences II studio
Supervisor: PhD Jakub Wróblewski

VR Lab, an installation inspired by the early practices of collecting herbs and fruits, consists of objects that are attributes of a human gatherer, suspended between a nostalgic past and a post-apocalyptic future. Objects refer to VR technology equipment – goggles, controllers, cables, sensors.

The material from which they have been made, subjected only to delicate manipulation, comes from plants collected by the artist in wastelands and urban outskirts. The context for these works is plant blindness syndrome, along with a belief in the magical properties of plants and technology. The objects are accompanied by quotations from the “Herbarium Magical, that is, a collection of superstitions about plants” (“Zielnik Czarodziejski, to jest, zbiór przesądów o roślinach”) from 1886.

The VR Lab also refers to a cargo cult from Pacific Ocean islands, where anthropologists discovered objects built from various plant materials that resembled airplanes, airstrips, and runways. In the awareness of the community living there, planes coming from the sky embodied an unknown power.

Krystyna Jędrzejewska-Szmek – artist and biologist. The axis of her interest is the interconnections and tensions between humans and the “more-than-human world.” In her artistic practice, she oscillates between art and science. She is a member of the ZAKOLE group, which focuses on finding ways of telling stories and experiencing areas such as marshes and bringing closer the perspective of the creatures that inhabit them. She graduated from the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and Biology at the University of Warsaw.