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UTOPIAS of expanded city

500 years ago, Thomas More published his Utopia – a vision of an ideal state, situated on an island, where people live in safety and harmony, inhabiting well-designed cities, working efficiently, though briefly, during the day and learning after labour. The citizens enjoy freedom of worship, women may serve as priestesses, but there are slaves there as well.

In 1516, the estimated human population of the Earth was 500 million.
500 years later, in 2016, there are as many as seven billion people in the world.

The developments that followed in the wake of the industrial revolution, including advancements in communication and urban planning, prompted new ideas of and hopeful expectations for the future. After the calamities of the early 20th century, its second half saw a revival of glorious visions of the future based on an unfettered technological progress. The conquest of the Earth and space was reflected in the futuristic design of the 1960s.

The UTOPIAS exhibition dwells on a transition the collective imaginary made at the turn of the 20th century, abandoning the notion of development as conquest and embracing scenarios of integrated future. The concepts of time and space transform, the Europe-centric world map morphs, and artists show fullness in place of emptiness, like in ancient Asian cosmologies. In artistic renderings, the ecosystem is inhabited by multiple, not only human, beings; animate and inanimate nature is no longer merely a resource of raw materials. The exhibition addresses the various ways in which arts explore the quest for sustainability and gestures at the art-showcased processes in which humans develop new understandings of their place in and relevance to the world as only one of its several components.

— Viola Krajewska, curator of the Eco Expanded City

Lynn Cazabon (US), Uncultivated, curators: Dominika Kluszczyk, Krzysztof Dobrowolski
, Magdalena Kreis
R. Buckminster Fuller (US), Inventions: Twelve Around One, curator: Piotr Krajewski
Takahiko Iimura (JP), MA: Space/Time in the Garden of Ryoan-Ji, curators: Viola Krajewska, Piotr Krajewski
AKI INOMATA (JP), Why Not Hand Over a «Shelter» to Hermit Crabs?, curator: Junya Yamamine
Paweł Janicki (PL), Vibra v.2 [Vv2], curator: Piotr Krajewski
Paweł Janicki (PL) + Bartosz Konieczny (PL), WTF, curator: Piotr Krajewski
Hajime Narukawa (JP), AuthaGraph, curator: Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka
Semiconductor – Ruth Jarman (UK) + Joe Gerhardt (UK), 20 Hz, curator: Viola Krajewska
Natalia Szczęch (PL), Soft Toys, curator: Viola Krajewska
Akira Wakita (JP), Furnished Fluid, curator: Piotr Krajewski

exhibition coordinator: Dominika Kluszczyk
exhibition architecture and design: Piotr Krajewski, Michał Michałczak, Sebastian Siepietowski