From Gondwana to Endangered, Who is the Devil Now?

In recent years, United Kingdom-based Polish artist Goshka Macuga has produced a series of large-scale fine tapestries that function as lightweight and portable public murals made with thread. Macuga’s art practice often makes comment on current concerns and influence public debate. Her point of departure is through extensive and in-depth research. She uses books, films, press cuttings, letters and other archival material, while also selecting pieces from museums and other collections and annotating works by other artists.

'From Gondwana to Endangered, Who is the Devil Now?', 2020 relates to her research into the environmental and cultural impacts of the bush fires in Australia and California in 2020. The scene, derived from documentary material and environmental protest imagery, shows a burning forest where protesters dressed as animals gather in support of each other. With these beings, Macuga draws our attention to the long storytelling tradition of using animals to symbolise human character traits. Evoking a scene from the future, the work’s incorporation of 3D imagery techniques also suggests links with the ‘furry fandom’ movement, a subculture interested in fictional animal characters with human characteristics, which originated at a science fiction convention in 1980.

Combining new and old technology, this work was woven on looms in Flanders, Belgium, the home of weaving since the Middle Ages. Macuga’s technique of collaging historical photographs and then having the image woven into a unified textile allows her to ‘illuminate the elusive relationship between historic documentation and truth’.

– Natasha Conland, Senior Curator, Global Contemporary Art, 2023

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