The exhibition borrows its name from a book first published in 1735 by Swedish naturalist Carl Linné (Linneus). The publication, together with other volumes by Linné, came to play a pivotal role in the establishment of universally accepted conventions for the naming of organisms. The Linnaean system, being the first one to methodically use binomial nomenclature, epitomized the far-reaching aspirations of the European plant sciences that were coming of age during the eighteenth century. During this time, as the European colonial empire expanded and generated a vast influx of new specimens, the elite scientific community raced to establish a system that could accurately describe and consistently catalogue all of the plants in the world. Imagine if another way of organizing and naming would have prevailed over the Linnaean system – would we now see the world differently?

Working intuitively in a darkroom, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky places dried and pressed samples of perforated foliage into a negative holder of an analogue enlarger and repeatedly exposes them though color filters, creating her photograms. Further, Kovacovsky’s 274 Gräser (2010) is a hardback book of unique inkjet photocopies of pressed plant specimens exhibited on top of a recent reprint of Hortus Eystettensis, a book that transfigured botanical art when it was first published in 1613.

Group exhibition with Ann Böttcher, Sanna Kannisto, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Kustaa Saksi, Salla Tykkä, and Michael John Whelan curated by Mirja Majevski