Elvin Flamingo

Never Be Certain of What You See | series of drawings, slideshow, 2018

In The Symbiosity of Creation, one of his earlier, most well-known projects, Elvin Flamingo raised ant colonies in specially built formicaria. The artist controlled their lives through the selection of an appropriate temperature, humidity or the food provided. Though this demanding, intermedia installation based on complex biological parameters brought him the greatest recognition, Elvin’s latest works are a fully conscious return to the most basic and oldest art medium: drawing by hand. The meticulous, nuanced ink drawings are made on small pieces of paper. For the NARRACJE festival, they were scanned and digitalized, in order to be enlarged and screened on a building wall. Owing to the resulting format, we may take a closer look at the tangled lines, patches and dots that create complex, abstract compositions. The presented drawings may bring to mind projections of urban planning layouts seen from a great height. From this perspective, streets, squares and buildings constitute a seemingly illogical network, which begins to make sense only when we allow our eyes to freely wander along the traces of lines and strokes. Some of the resulting associations may bring us back to Elvin’s previous fascination: the world of ants and their kingdom of underground tunnels. Subsequent drawings may manifest movement, incessant bustle or a dynamic composition – perhaps we might recognize them as a metaphor of our everyday lives, with their rush, twists and turns. Although we cannot be sure that this is indeed what we are going to see.

location: wall of a residential building, Poczty Gdańskiej 2

 

Elvin Flamingo (Jarosław Czarnecki, b. 1967) is a visual artist. He studied at the Faculty of Painting and Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, graduating in 2004. Between 2011 and 2014, he was a PhD student at the Transdisciplinary Action Studio of his alma mater, where he lectured since 2012 and currently works as the Associate Dean of the Faculty of Sculpture and Intermedia. He is the author of a multi-annual project The Symbiosity of Creation, which started in 2012 and was the basis of his PhD thesis nominated for the Prime Minister’s Award. Flamingo creates intermedia projects that combine art, biology and technology. He works with bio-art, performance art, film, music and interventions in the public space. He lives and works in Sopot.

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Narracje 10

Narracje 10