The project by Diana Lelonek can be treated as a shock therapy of a kind, but also as a sophisticated act of vengeance. It is a Vendetta carried out with biological weapons, systematically and with scientific precision. The battle is fought with colonies of microbes: fungi and bacteria. The enemies seem tangible: some of them are looking at as from portraits published on the pages of Władysław Tatarkiewicz’s “Encyclopaedia of Philosophy”. However, these black and white representations of classical philosophers, authors of fundamental works within European humanistic thought, are only a substitute of the real target. The images symbolise the actual object of the attack: the extremely complex philosophical, anthropocentric and hierarchical vision of human history, as well as the dualist concept of a world divided into the allegedly wonderful culture and the idyllic nature, the powerful human beings and organisms inferior to them, the wretched body and the perfect spirit, the good familiar things and the bad alien ones. Lelonek transforms the gallery space into a laboratory, where she tests different kinds of parasitism of microorganisms on the products of European civilization. Until now, territorial expansion and subjugation of weaker (understood as inferior) species was a characteristic typical only and exclusively of Western society and culture, and specifically – as the artist points out – white and wealthy Europeans. This time the tables have turned. What was suppressed and denied can finally take revenge, at least metaphorically.

Curator: Marcin Krasny

Academy overgrown by various species of molds and bacterias, from the series: “Zoe-Therapy”, 56×70, 2017

From the “Zoe-therapy” 100x70cm, 2015