Elvin Flamingo
Collective Making 02, Part 2 / Ants’ Way
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Kunsthal Aarhus presents ANTS’ WAY, a pioneering bio-art project by the Polish artist Jarosław Czarnecki (aka Elvin Flamingo), scheduled to take place until the year 2034.

The idea behind ANTS’ WAY, which also bears the title The Symbiosity of Creation, is to create a work that is not simply a fixed artifact produced by a single creator-demiurge, but an emergent force that lives its own life, that participates,interacts, and is symbiotic with its author, who takes a conscious departure from a demiurge position, and becomes an uncompromising part of the work as a whole where no single entity is sovereign. The lifetime of the work is not limited to the period of its exhibition, but its future is guaranteed to function with creative integrity for many years to come.

In line with posthumanism and new materialism, the Nature-Culture dualism is undermined as well as the classic dividebetween the artist and creation. Playful reference to Bruno Latour’s “Actor-Network Theory” (ANT) with the title ANTS’ WAY is not coincidental but provides useful insight into how making is dispersed through networks to include multiple actants.

The artist further explains some of the thinking behind the project: “Paraphrasing Michel de Certeau, and further Michel Foucault, it’s obvious that my train of thought within the context of the The Symbiosity of Creation only records the tracks of more or less certain steps into territory that has long been inhabited. Despite this, this project changes me, and what I thought; I co-create in order to change, to change my thinking, and to no longer think like I did before. In this sense, my work not only changes my thinking, but also my perceptions of everything outside of the narcissistic, egotistical “I”. There are absolutely no compromises in what we create together, and each of us the superorganisms and me - mean nothing on our own; we don’t exist without one another as a work of art. We have found the shared quotidian that we create together.”

The project comprises four parts

  1. Reconstruction of Non-human Culture
  2. Kingdom of the Shared Quotidian
  3. Subterranean Struggle
  4. After Humans. The Biocorporation

In the context of the COLLECTIVE MAKING exhibition series (2015-2016), ANTS’ WAY neatly points to other realms of making that extends the previous exhibition DUMP!. Here the nonhuman provides new aesthetic possibilities for making and doing in which agency and authorship of the mainstream art world are challenged for their conservativism. Here, creativity is an emergent and unpredictable set of complex events and relations that give rise to new kinds of collective forms of action in the world.

ELVIN FLAMINGO
(Jarosław Czarnecki), born in 1967 in Pelplin, Poland. He studied in the Faculty of Painting and Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts (ASP) in Gdańsk, and received his Master of Fine Arts in 2004. His artistic debut was in 2008 with the para-documentary film Small Spaces (awarded with the Gold Remi Award in Houston, USA). In 2012 he won the Grand Prix at the Gdańsk Biennale of Art with the installation Two Men and the Sopot Sign. He has received grants and scholarships from the Ministry of Science (2014) and the Ministry of Culture (2015). From 2011 to 2014, he was a doctoral student in the Workshop of Transdisciplinary Work in the Faculty of Sculpture and Intermedia, at ASP Gdańsk. From 2012, he has lectured in this faculty.

The Symbiosity of Creation (aka ANTS’ WAY) was his doctoral dissertation and was awarded with the Critics and Editors of Art Magazines Award at WRO Media Art Biennale 2015 in Wrocław.

ANTS’ WAY is part of COLLECTIVE MAKING (2015-2016), initiated and curated by Joasia Krysa. The series is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, the Obel Family Foundation, Goethe-Institut Dänemark and Aarhus Kommune.

The exhibition is realised in cooperation with WRO Art Centre, Wroclaw, Poland.

Opening: 2 October, 17-19 (double opening with the exhibition do it)