The exhibition brings together three RCA (Royal College of Art) graduates Georgia Ghaznavi, Jan Valik and Sean Powers. The artists negotiate meanings of post-human environments through abstract painting. Valik and Powers place us in their post-apocalyptic landscapes, while Ghaznavi immerses us into the microcosmos of non-human forms. The works collectively articulate a post-human condition allowing us to imagine what a –not so fictional–  “world without us” would look like. 

 

My first encounter with the life-altering effects of technology was through a woman’s interview describing the torture of living near META’s datacenter located in Mansfield, GA, USA. A hub of virtual knowledge, condensed within a massive metal enclosure. The inorganic buzzing and the strong smell of artificiality thickening the air, converge where the natural and the man-made collide, and abstraction is materialized. Her voice cracks in her testimony: “It’s overwhelming. You feel like you’re up against this wall that you can’t penetrate. There’s nothing that you can do and they don’t care.” In the Anthropocene, the well-being of both nature and humans is bargained away in the face of profit through extractive economies that reproduce inequality. Thousands of promised jobs, thousands of acres of land consumed to host them. How are such infrastructures to reshape humans, living conditions and geology?

 

“Either way, the best of all possible news is that, should “we” survive the Anthropocene, it will not be as “humans.”

– Benjamin Bratton

 

“Anthropocene” describes a social and geological condition in which human activity has become an uncontrollable nature-altering force, reshaping environments and systems of life. While its definition remains contested, its effects are already evident: altered ecologies, knowledge and living conditions.

 

Featuring Artists: 

 

Georgia Ghaznavi studies the organic architecture found in plant life and insects—their shapes, patterns, growth systems, and adaptive behaviors. Her imagery resembles the inside of a machine: interwoven layers assembling a synchronically hyper-natural and a hyper-technical organism. These artificial forms vibrate with kinetic energy, emphasizing their hybridity. 

 

Jan Valik investigates the relationship between organic and man-made forms through abstract landscapes. Wandering through his metaphysical territories and moving between perceptual ambiguities, emotion and the estranged, Valik’s images portray the memory of a once-familiar landscape.                                 

 

Sean Powers’s “ecotone paintings” evoke a perceptual distance between image and viewer, particularly through perspective. His landscapes appear alien and dream-like, while the distorted depictions of the natural realm dismantle the barrier between the experienced and the imagined.

 

Text by Eirini Agourzenidou, researcher