ART Lab_PROJECTS
The new location of the Wyspa Progress Foundation is on Sobieszewska Island in Gdańsk. ART LAB Wyspa, located on a one-hectare plot, consists of an office, library, archive and collection of the Wyspa Progress Foundation, as well as a Residency Studio where we run the Artist-in-Residence programme. Our place is partly an experimental ARTLAB, which on the one hand will seek special connections between art and science, and on the other, more importantly, an ECOLOGICAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS NATURE AND THE ECOSYSTEM.
We want to achieve these goals by applying a critical and research-based approach
that redefines the NATURE/CULTURE dichotomy and artistic techniques from the field of so-called ‘wet media’, biomedia and available artistic and scientific tools. To this end, we invite people involved in such solutions to share their knowledge and experience. We run a residency programme for artists and scientists who coordinate workshops for various social groups, which take place in the studio, in the garden and in selected locations on Sobieszewska Island. Our activities in this area began several years ago with the Foundation's collaboration with the Transdisciplinary Activities of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and the Faculty of Biology and the Faculty of Biotechnology of the University of Gdańsk.
This involves consultation and implementation of conceptual projects (using any techniques) and those involving selected safe tissue and cell cultures, plants and animals. Works based on wet biological media, where living objects are most often presented rather than represented, are a form of art critically related to biotechnological practices and subject to artistic reflection. The collaboration began in 2013, coordinated by Dr Anna Biała from the Faculty of Biology at the University of Gdańsk. Preliminary work and consultations allowed the group of students to familiarise themselves with the principles of working in laboratories and to develop a platform for communicating the forms of presenting bioart project concepts.
