The Damaged Planet – Aneta Rostkowska: Moss time. Towards vegetal curating

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Aneta Rostkowska: Moss time. Towards vegetal curating

In the last years we can observe a proliferation of thinkers and curators claiming that the vision of nature as a completely depoliticized means of improving our mood, a perfectly functioning consumption object, is not the only one we have at our disposal. They aim to free the world of plants from the reactionary context of interior design magazines and superficial eco-trends, revealing its emancipatory potential leading to a substantial transformation of our worldviews. Through questioning of the common understanding of plants as mechanical “things” that react solely to simple stimuli, they allow plants to leave the lowest position in the hierarchy of beings (traditionally ascribed to them by many philosophers), leading to a vision of a fundamental continuity between humans and plants, the latter of which – dynamic, breathing and growing – are endowed with intentionality and even memory.
In her lecture Aneta Rostkowska would like not only to analyse the presence of nature and nature-related themes in contemporary curatorial practices but also to provide her own vision concerning how this new, potentially (r)evolutionary approach to plants could be followed by a structural change in the basic organisational ‘unit’ of the art world: the art institution.

Aneta Rostkowska is a curator, researcher and writer, a graduate of the de Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam. She is pursuing experimental curatorial practices in which politically relevant storytelling develops through carefully constructed sensual environments. Rostkowska studied philosophy, economics and art history in Kraków, Poznań, Heidelberg and Frankfurt am Main. She worked as a curator at Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in Kraków (2011-2016) and at the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne (2016-2018). Since January 2019 she is a director of Temporary Gallery, Centre for Contemporary Art in Cologne. Apart from curating, she has also been teaching art theory, art history and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Art Academy of Szczecin, Dutch Art Institue in Arnhem, University of Cologne and Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf.