Diana Lelonek’s work draws on the ideas of posthumanism, and similarly to this intellectual movement, it crit- icizes humanism for its anthropocentric perspective. She manages to blur the line that separates humans from the rest of the world. The naturists who pose for her photographs are shown in a way that brings to mind representations of herds of animals or primal, nomadic tribes usually depicted in the surroundings of nature. The elements of modern urban architecture, or indus- trial infrastructure shown in the background, rule out the vision of a return to nature. The artist selects places in-be- tween, in which the suburbs of cities and civilization are taken over by synanthropic vegetation. Naked human figures presented in natural surroundings send our historicistic consciousness back to primordial times, but the elements of civilization place them firmly in the present.

The resulting visual dissonance is a clever way to uncover the artificiality of divisions that the modern cultural discourse relies on. As Monika Blakke notes in a conversation about Diana Lelonek’s works, humans do not need to return to their animalistic past, because in fact they never ceased to be animals in the first place. They don’t need to return to nature as they never existed outside of it. Photographs from Lelonek’s Yesterday I met a really wild man series place humankind in this context, portraying it as just another species in the universecalled natureculture. Her work discards artificial divisions into the human and the non-human, nature and culture, and once again, it opposes speciesism.

Curator: Katarzyna Różniak