The exhibition’s title invokes the philosophical concept of Natura Naturans—nature understood as generative force, as process rather than product. Within this framework, art is conceived as an active principle: a field in which light, time, and matter emerge. The exhibition places works from the Frants Family Collection in dialogue with over 20 contemporary media artists, tracing a continuous trajectory of artistic becoming from the 20th century to the present. The early 20th century marked a decisive shift from representation toward construction—from depicting the visible world to articulating its underlying forces. Color became autonomous, light structural, form dynamic. The avant-garde sought not to imitate nature but to participate in its generative logic. This impulse persisted in the unofficial art of postwar Leningrad, where artists working outside Socialist Realism sustained experimental approaches to structure and perception, affirming art as an independent and evolving system grounded in process.

If early modernism explored movement and temporality through pigment and composition, today’s artists engage these forces through automation, kinetics, atmospheric systems, and digital code. Within this expanded field, art reveals its most delicate states—its intervals, hesitations, and vulnerabilities—making visible the subtle thresholds where form emerges, shifts, and recedes. Media becomes not a layer added to the work, but a sensitive field in which it exists: exposed, contingent, and quietly in flux. In her automated kineographs, Anna Frants explores the evolving relationship between light and time, reanimating humanity’s enduring desire to capture movement through illumination — from prehistoric cave paintings to contemporary digital animation. Jaanika Peerna’s installation evokes the fluidity and atmospheric memory of glaciers. Its title expresses a poignant paradox: we must love glaciers deeply, yet keep that love cold enough to prevent their disappearance.

Tuula Närhinen revisits avian evolution through speculative hybrid bird species designed to survive on plastic detritus. Through this ecological fiction, she reflects on environmental transformation and the shifting relationship between wildlife and urban landscapes. Mariateresa Sartori exposes an anemometer to the wind, allowing it to produce circular drawings that hover between mechanical objectivity and subtle human intervention. Meanwhile, the futurist-inflected kinetic mobiles of Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov revisit the experimental energy of the early avant-garde, translating its dynamism into a contemporary idiom. The collective AES+F explores themes of corporeality, depression, and altered perception through digitally mediated aesthetics, oscillating between the fairytale-like and the disturbing.

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The exhibition opens with a live performance by Mexican artist Hugo Solis featuring a sound-based intervention, alongside a participatory performance by Andy Barrt.

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Organized by CYLAND Foundation

in partnership with Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Centre for Studies in Russian, Central Asian and Caucasian Art — CSAR, and Weave

General Sponsor: Frants Foundation