Covert, 2023, 3D animation, audio recording, song, 6′22″
musical cooperation / song performance: Zosia Hołubowska
Taking advantage of SF (speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, scientific fact) tools, Ernest Borowski is projecting a vision of the world on the brink of an all-embracing collapse of life and system organisations as we know them – a world wherein the capitalist organisation of (over)production-based existence is bereft of all meaning.The narrative may be interpreted as imminent (in time), allowing an insight into co-sensibilities occurring just beyond our line of sight.
In his artistic practice, Borowski frequently references queering ecologies, examining ties between nature, biology and sexuality – and queer theory. Covert core pillars include a song prepared in collaboration with Zosia Hołubowska / Mala Herba, with interwoven motifs of labour criticism (in economic terms), queer closeness and inter-species tenderness – components of radical and speculative visions of the future. The artist expands his narrative to include more-than-human entities, inviting us to consider them a part of our queer family.
The Covert’s visual layer comprises a series of virtual micro-landscapes, local settlers more-than-human, imagery of existent and imagined species. Borowski embeds them in pre-renovation architecture of the Arsenal Gallery, formerly a power station (located in Bialystok, Poland), treating it as a source of memory, of modified data whose traces, while present, are well concealed. The artist believes that such images help accentuate the very essence of transformation occurring in human and non-human ecosystems.
Ernest Borowski
Interdisciplinary artist and researcher operating at the intersection of new media, sound, performance, and speculative narrative. Their work explores dispersed, multi-voiced identities and queer modes of existence that transcend linear models of subjectivity and production. They are interested in deconstructing established categories of identity and normative systems through forms of anti-productivity, fragmentation and interspecies relations. They employ speculative methods to imagine futures alternative to dominant narratives – futures in which bodies and technologies co-produce new forms of knowledge and ways of being.
