Jana Zatvarnická – Datura Queen

Artist Talk

6.00 PM

 

You are invited to an Artist Talk that will take place as part of the ongoing exhibition Wild Garden Utopia – Chapter 7.

We will introduce you to her long-term project Imagining a Herbarium, which focuses on critical research on plants and sexual ecology. Exploring the impact of the Anthropocene on botany, anthropology, and somatic medicine through posthuman theories, her artworks see symbiotic bodies made of human and non-human forms in a time of climatic nightmares. She symbolically depicts women as plants responding to ecological and gendered violence.

Datura Queen is the title of a movie made in collaboration with Trinidadian artist and filmmaker Arnaldo James. The movie’s main goal is to relearn the knowledge of plants as a process of coexistence between human and non-human creatures, which is told through the story of a plant called Datura Stramonium.

Jana Zatvarnická (1988, Michalovce) has been collaborating on interdisciplinary projects with researchers in archaeology, anthropology, speleology, botany, and environmental studies in Slovakia, Slovenia, Guatemala, and Mexico since 2015.

She responds to environmental, ecological, and sociopolitical issues using references from history, mythology, archives, museum collections, and science-fiction literature.

The gallery program and the realization of the artist’s work was supported by using public funding by @fondnapodporuumenia.

The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.