The Æon exhibition is a dialogue between two duos: Justyna and Paweł Baśnik, and Inside Job, consisting of Ula Lucińska and Michał Knychaus. Krupa Gallery, the British branch of Wrocław’s gallery, presents the exhibition as its third London project, exploring reality from a timeless perspective.
The starting point for the idea and narrative layer of the exhibition was the concept of the aeon – a geochronological unit spanning eras lasting hundreds of millions of years. The artists shown at 1 Pakenham Street explore this vast time quite thoroughly, reaching with their paintings, sculptures, and installations, both into the distant past and sketching a vision of possible futures.
We talk to the duos about exploring alternative timelines and examining the position of humans in their relationships with not only non-human beings but also inanimate ones, as well as about searching for hope in times of crisis.
Inside Job
Both Ula Lucińska (b. 1992) and Michał Knychaus (b. 1987) are graduates of the New Media Department at the University of Arts in Poznań. Their artistic interests focus on environmental, social, and geopolitical changes that shape the present and influence the imaginary of possible futures. In their practice, they use various media and materials to build multi-layered, object-based environments, many of which spin catastrophic scenarios in which hauntings from the past intertwine with futuristic speculations. Using fiction as a working methodology, they explore its self-fulfilling potential, predicting dystopias and utopias to examine their possibilities and limitations.
Kuba Żary: What do you say about the titular period, unimaginable from a human perspective and virtually impossible to comprehend, through your works presented at the Æon exhibition?
Inside Job: Aeon is a period stretched beyond the human scale – a kind of phantom time that permeates everything and cannot be confined to any specific framework. It suggests a distance that allows us to see other perspectives, other ways of thinking.
We feel that turning towards what is beyond our understanding might be liberating – it is a search for hope in times of crisis. Then we can imagine that there are things around us that happen on a different timeline, at a different rhythm, on a different scale, and that they too are causal, that they too have meaning and weight. These are the themes that have been inspiring us lately. The leitmotif of the aeon in the exhibition appears in the way we work with materials, in the forms and tensions present in the objects – in our case, these are casts of the foundations of a building that no longer exists, recycled leather jackets and vests, scraps of fabric that were not used in our previous works, and metals from production waste. We are interested not so much in the chronological flow of time as in processes of transformation, mutation, multiplication and the unfolding of matter.
The leitmotif of the aeon in the exhibition appears in the way we work with materials, in the forms and tensions present in the objects.
– Inside Job
K.Ż: In your works, you create speculative visions of the future, which may, however, be inspired by stories or cultural texts from centuries ago, such as the enigmatic Voynich Manuscript. What other inspirations can we find in the presented pieces? And what version of the future are you weaving with them?
Inside Job: The future in our work is fragmented and stitched together – if we had to answer concisely, that would be the shortest response. The Voynich Manuscript, which we used as a source of inspiration – a mysterious handwritten volume by an anonymous author, dating back six centuries, which has not yet been deciphered – is for us primarily a symbol of resistance to the rigid interpretation. Its undecoded language and weird iconography became a pretext for us to think about knowledge that eludes translation, that is porous, through which many assumptions leak. We believe that our work can function in a similar way. In their forms, we find familiar structures, but on the other hand, their function is disrupted, a bit like in the case of an unreadable language.
The inspirations present in the Æon exhibition are therefore scattered – organic, fictional, and technological. We refer to cycles of degradation and regeneration, to the idea of material survival, but also to the desire to understand something that completely transcends us. The future that emerges from this is neither apocalyptic nor utopian. It is simply uncertain.
K.Ż: The central motif that permeates many of your artistic proposals is various plant entities. At the same time, you use anthropogenic materials to tell these stories: processed metals, leather, and synthetic fabrics. What is the main source of this tension in your work: between the organic and the synthetic, the living and the lifeless?
Inside Job: It simply comes from observation. We draw a lot of inspiration from trips to contemporary ruins, former industrial sites, places that are ‘degraded’ or have been affected by some kind of catastrophe. We look at how nature is redeveloping there. For a long time, we photographed thistles, which thrive in such difficult conditions. This determination, but also a very subtle strength, is inspiring to us.
In our latest works, this clash between nature and technology is becoming increasingly hybrid. This is the case, for example, in the installation Paradise Rot, which we presented some time ago at the BWA Gallery in Wrocław. In the Æon, the same approach can be seen in the objects from the series Anitya (There are flowers that are born of mud) – there, metallic structures support black, seemingly charred, but still developing flowers. The boundary between the organic and the synthetic, the living and the lifeless, is very thin here – it is precisely this boundary that we are most interested in exploring.
K.Ż: Alongside your works, the London exhibition features objects created by Justyna and Paweł Baśnik. Do your works weave together into a coherent narrative, or do they emphasise completely different aspects?
Inside Job: Though there is no clear linear narrative in the structure of the exhibition itself, and we show objects that come from different periods of our art practice, we think that these two perspectives complement each other. The exhibition is divided into two levels, two floors of the gallery. The works of both our duos mix, intersect and neighbour each other. Paweł and Justyna’s pieces are more firmly rooted in the past; in our case, it is more of a vector directed towards what is yet to come, although still heavily imbued with the ‘ghosts’ of the past. The decision to mix the works is also meant to suggest this temporal interference not only on a simple past-future line, but rather in a cooperative manner.
“The decision to mix the works is also meant to suggest this temporal interference not only on a simple past-future line, but rather in a cooperative manner.”
– Inside Job
Justyna and Paweł Baśnik
Justyna Baśnik (b. 1992) and Paweł Baśnik (b. 1992) are painters and graduates of the Faculty of Painting and Sculpture at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław (where Paweł currently works as an assistant professor). In her artistic practice, Justyna focuses on creating her own parareligious iconography, which broadly comments on the phenomena of pseudoscience and post-truth, and criticises religious fundamentalism. Although Paweł’s works refer to mortal themes, historical and psychological motifs, he also touches upon topics related to transhumanist concepts of immortality and their mythological and religious roots. They have co-created numerous artistic projects: the Bezimienny (Nameless Hero) painting collective, the parareligious artistic group and nomadic gallery, Kościół Nihilistów (The Nihilist Church), and the art magazine “Przemijam”.
Kuba Żary: For your own purposes, in the context of the themes you deal with in your work, how do you define the aeon in the title – a period of time so long from a human perspective that it is virtually synonymous with timelessness?
Justyna & Paweł Baśnik: Aeon is indeed synonymous with eternity – something beyond human measure. We believe that one of the most important tasks artists can perform today is to create narratives that question the anthropocentric view of reality. Humanity is both unique and insignificant in the grand scheme of life, and our selfish and brutal pursuit of subjugating the forces of nature is slowly turning against us. It is high time we truly understood that our survival depends on the fair coexistence with other inhabitants of the planet and forces that are still more powerful than us. This is what we are trying to say with our work.
K.Ż: In your work, you refer to historical visual traditions, drawing on aesthetic tropes and techniques from centuries ago – but you do so in order to reflect on very contemporary challenges. What makes you shape your artistic language in this way?
J & P.B: We reach for old visual forms not out of nostalgia, but because they are still very well suited to talking about what is current. We treat the pre-modernist language as a tool whose cultural meanings we can transform and use in a contemporary context.
What is distinctive about Justyna’s work is the balance between a religious and a scientific aura. The shapes that appear in her works often refer to Gothic art, but the meaning itself focuses on secular spirituality based on a rational scientific paradigm. The exhibition features an object that brings together all the elements that characterise her work: an object resembling a tabernacle and concealing an authentic relic. However, it is not a fragment of a saint’s body, but a 100-million-year-old cephalopod shell, whose proportions resemble the golden ratio. Another installation, Tree of Life, reminiscent of altars in form, depicts the motif of the eponymous tree, common to many mythologies. It was this archetype that Charles Darwin used to illustrate the processes of evolution – in this context, however, it ceased to be a symbol of divine order, becoming rather an image of change and the relationships that connect all forms of life. This is why the ornaments appearing in the work can be associated with both plants and animal fossils.
The use of ancient visual languages is also present in Paweł’s figurative works. They create a syncretic iconography drawing on various mythological themes that still constitute our reality. An example of this is the painting Hybrid, previously presented in Poland at the collective exhibition, The Temple of Tales, in which all four of us took part. The concept of the exhibition referred to the figure of Rubezhal, the spirit of the Karkonosze Mountains. He was depicted in various forms of human-animal hybrids, and Paweł’s painting develops this theme. Such interspecies combinations are an excellent tool for emphasising the subjectivity of nature.
Among Paweł’s paintings, there are also those inspired not by ancient visual tradition, but by primaeval times as such. In His House at R’lyeh Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming, for example, refers to the Lovecraftian idea of using aesthetics to reach a reality beyond our cognition. The motif of an ancient creature resting deep beneath the surface is a reference to the history of life recorded in fossils, but unlike the dormant Cthulhu, this history is dead. The Earth is a tomb that draws everything living into its interior and, at the same time, a treasure trove of information about the history of the biosphere. Paweł also presents an abstract diptych, which is a representation of geological structures formed over millions of years – painting tools are kept to a minimum, giving way to the forces that create river beds and sedimentary layers.
“This non-linear mix creates a coherent whole – it reminds us of the continuity of life, which did not begin with us and does not necessarily have to end with us.”
– J. & P. Baśnik
K.Ż: I am asking questions using the plural, even though your works remain formally separate. However, they intertwine in meaning – how much of the creative process do you share, and which stages are completely individual?
J & P.B: Indeed, the works presented in the exhibition are separate, but their concept was developed in a joint process. With each subsequent exhibition, our collaboration becomes stronger – we share a studio, conduct research together, discuss inspirations and build a context for our individual projects. Although the process of creating individual works is separate, at each stage, we look for solutions that will allow our works to resonate appropriately. We think of them not only as individual statements, but also as elements of a larger, coherent narrative.
It is also significant that we co-create two artistic collectives: Kościół Nihilistów and Bezimienny. All of this is the result of our joint deliberations.
K.Ż: The exhibition pairs your works with objects by the duo Inside Job. How do they dialogue with each other?
J & P.B: The works we are showing in the exhibition focus mainly on vast time scales. Our projects reach far back into the past, to the beginnings of life on our planet: they contain references to geological structures and fossils, which are material evidence of the existence of the world before humans, in a perspective that transcends our everyday understanding of time. In the case of Ula and Michał, it is a vector running into the future. This non-linear mix creates a coherent whole – it reminds us of the continuity of life, which did not begin with us and does not necessarily have to end with us.
Æon
16 May — 3 Jul 2025
Krupa Gallery, London
