Garden of Hope: Vladimir Kanic | Main Gallery Exhibition

Garden of Hope is a transdisciplinary solo exhibition by Vladimir Kanic, featuring fifty new works that navigate the boundaries between art, ecology, and technology. Reimagining the gallery space as both a site of communal healing and ecological activism, the exhibition transcends the aesthetic experience to become an agent of climate resilience and interspecies kinship, a space where art functions not as an object but as a process, an ecosystem, and an act of care. By weaving personal narratives of postwar healing, maritime heritage, and diasporic memory with eco-art interventions, Kanic invites audiences to reflect and act on their role within the planetary ecosystem, where every breath connects us to the fragile, resilient networks of life. 

The centerpiece of Garden of Hope is Kanic’s largest living algae sculpture to date - a suspended, breathing installation that actively captures atmospheric carbon. As algae grow, they absorb CO₂ from the air, transforming human breath into a tangible act of climate resilience. This ongoing metabolic exchange turns spectators into participants, dissolving the boundary between artwork and ecosystem. Over time, the living sculpture thickens, deepens in color, and produces fresh oxygen, creating a visible, evolving record of environmental interaction - an inscription of ecological time written in organic matter. 

Through immersive installations of living matter, futuristic textiles inspired by lost cultural traditions, and other media exploring memory and displacement, Garden of Hope positions breathing not only as a biological function but as a site of deep ecological entanglement. In an era of environmental and cultural fragmentation, Kanic offers a vision where healing is not just personal but planetary and where survival is not about returning to what was, but about imagining what can be built anew – a radical hope. 

Vladimir Kanic thanks his incredible community for collaborating and contributing to the making of this incredibly ambitious exhibition. Special appreciation goes to those who not only engaged in intellectual collaboration but also made sure he was fed, checked in on him, and generally kept him alive throughout the process.  A very special thank you to Ryan Kelln and Nicolas Rodrigo for their invaluable expertise and time, which directly shaped this work. A heartfelt thank you to Andrea Carson Barker, Dawn Burns, Abbozzo Gallery, Ðurðica Kanic, Marissa Largo, Nina Levitt, Jacob Notten, John Notten, Joel Ong, Amani Shaw, Quincy Shaw, and Brandon Vickerd for their generous support and contributions.

Everything That is Broken Can be Fixed (With a Needle and Thread)  is a series of light-based textiles woven from algal carbon fibers, transforming atmospheric pollution into material form. Rooted in ancient Croatian glassmaking traditions, Kanic merges fragile, breakable materials with textile production, embedding acts of repair into their very structure. These textiles function as memory systems, preserving endangered artistic traditions while imagining new material ecologies. Backlit in the exhibition space, they reveal shifting relationships between opacity and transparency, fracture and cohesion, with motifs from Kanic’s late grandmother’s quilts—seaweed, boats, and waves—emerging within their layered surfaces. Embodying the ethos of Garden of Hope, the series proposes resilience as an active, ongoing process, where survival is not about restoring the past but creating new possibilities from what remains.

Future Tales of Long Ago is a fine art print series that reimagines ancient Croatian folklore, where supernatural beings once served as protectors of nature and humanity. Drawing from Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić’s 1916 book Croatian Tales of Long Ago and echoes of these myths in contemporary rituals, Kanic fuses the organic textures of algae-based canvases with digital renderings to visualize his future sculptures. Bridging forgotten histories with speculative futures, the series transforms ancestral memory into a living archive, offering a vision where fractured histories become sites of renewal and ecological consciousness.

The Croatian saying “There are two options – either we catch the fish, or we don’t,” reflects a philosophy of adaptive stillness rooted in fjaka – a mindset defined by a relaxed, carefree attitude, embodying the idea of "taking it easy" or "doing nothing" while fully embracing and enjoying the present moment. Hand-stitched by Kanic’s grandmother Eve in 1946, it preserves a nearly lost Croatian embroidery technique that interweaves odd and even elements to create precise yet organic symmetry. The linen canvas, woven by Kanic’s grandfather Joseph during World War II to support his family, embodies a lineage of craft, resilience, and survival. A singular heirloom, its motifs – seaweed, boats, and waves – form the foundation for Garden of Hope, where Kanic extends his grandmother’s legacy into the future, showing how cultural traditions endure and evolve through radical hope.

Becoming Glasswort is a fine art print series inspired by the resilient coastal plant Glasswort, which thrives in the salt fields of Kanic’s ancestral island of Pag. Merging the material memory of his late grandmother’s quilts with digital compositions, the series forms speculative blueprints for his carbon-based textiles – hybrid works integrating glassmaking, textile, and sculpture – where motifs from the quilt of seaweed, boats, and waves act as guardians of memory; bridging past traditions with future material ecologies. By translating inherited knowledge into a visual language of endurance, Becoming Glasswort embodies the ethos of Garden of Hope, proposing resilience not as preservation but as a generative force that transforms loss into renewal and inheritance into radical hope.

The Book of Waves is a series of free-standing sculptures that transform breath and carbon pollution into oxygen, offering a tangible response to the climate crisis. Kanic presents them as beacons of a decarbonized future, where collective action becomes as natural as breathing. As algae grow, they absorb CO₂ from the air, forming a biomass that Kanic uses as sculptural material. Viewers actively participate in this process by exhaling, feeding the algae, which grow over time and releases fresh oxygen back into the space. Each sculpture removes tons of carbon per year. By blending art and climate action, Book of Waves reimagines our relationship with the environment, inviting us to see collaboration—between humans, nature, and technology—as essential to a livable future.

At the heart of Garden of Hope, LACE is the largest living algae sculptural installation created by Kanic to date - a suspended, breathing artwork capable of capturing tons of carbon per year. This ecosystem of living algae, spectators, AI, and interactive projections transforms the gallery into a networked space of interspecies collaboration, where humans, algae, and machines co-create a future beyond the Anthropocene.

Inspired by the UNESCO-protected lacework of Pag, the artist’s ancestral island, and the textile mastery of his grandmother, LACE extends beyond its sculptural form. It embodies a philosophy of rhizomatic interconnectedness, where fragile, interwoven structures create strength, resilience, and regeneration. This concept became literal when the artwork was shattered in a previous exhibition. Rather than discarding it, Kanic repaired and expanded it using textile patches, embedding patterns from his grandmother’s embroidery into the reassembled form.

Developed in collaboration with software artist Ryan Kelln, a network of sensors placed throughout the gallery captures the shifts in humidity, temperature, and CO₂ levels generated by the presence and breath of spectators. These atmospheric fluctuations directly shape the projections, morphing their visual composition in real time. The algae, responding to the very breath of the audience, create a feedback loop between human and nonhuman rhythms, turning the installation into a site of collective participation and interspecies interaction.

LACE embodies the essence of radical hope through the creation of new, interwoven futures where human and nonhuman life sustain one another in an ongoing cycle of care.

Photosynthetic Archives I is a fine art print series capturing macro portraits of algal communities—Earth’s oldest oxygen-producing organisms—as if posing for the camera. These microscopic beings, which shaped the planet’s breathable atmosphere and serve as vital carbon sinks, also generate calcium carbonate, the foundation of seashells and limestone, the very stone used for some of the earliest records of human language, such as the Rosetta Stone or the Croatian Baška Tablet.

Extending into video projection, the series documents algae’s daily lives, highlighting their role as storytellers, witnesses, and collaborators in planetary survival. By making the invisible visible, Photosynthetic Archives I reframes algae as agents of radical hope, emphasizing adaptation, care, and the deep-time processes that sustain life.

Photosynthetic Archives II is a fine art print series exploring the communicative capacities of algae—Earth’s largest carbon-capturing network. Through two years of research, Kanic has studied how algae emit an effervescent language of CO₂ bubbles and electromagnetic signals, visualized in Algal Language Tablets, a speculative lexicon bridging scientific observation and artistic interpretation. Each print depicts a tablet written in a different dialect of Alganese, extending the history of inscription beyond human traditions and drawing from the Croatian Baška Tablet, itself formed from millennia of compressed marine life.

Accompanied by an interactive video projection, the series transcribes the metabolic rhythms of living algae into real-time visual inscriptions, responding to the breath and presence of spectators. By making this language visible, Photosynthetic Archives II challenges anthropocentric notions of communication, positioning nonhuman expression as a vital site of ecological knowledge and inviting us to listen, decode, and participate in a world beyond human language.

Atmospheric Attunements is a photographic and cinematic installation that weaves together personal and ecological memory through Kanic’s family archive and his ongoing exploration of breath, water, and resilience. Fourteen black-and-white photographs juxtapose intimate images of Kanic’s family’s maritime life in 1960s–70s Croatia – captured by his mother Georgia (Ðurðica) – with manipulated versions that explore memory’s fragmentation, absence, and political re-inscription. A color photograph of twelve-year-old Kanic at the Adriatic Sea on the eve of the Croatian War of Independence is paired with a film projection of him as an adult, free-diving in the same waters, linking past and present through the ritual of breath.

This installation extends Kanic’s ongoing exploration of post-war trauma and the role of art in healing. By reinterpreting his family’s photographic archive through fragmentation, juxtaposition, and ritual, he invites viewers into a space of intimate vulnerability and repair. Here, images do not simply document the past - they become porous, shifting, and alive, breathing with the weight of memory and the possibility of renewal. 

Projected onto a monumental 60 x 80 inch algal biomass screen, the film mirrors the processes of rupture and repair central to Kanic’s work, where fractures in the material are sutured rather than hidden, embodying care and endurance. In an adjacent space, the projection shifts – its colours warmer, contours blurred—evoking the impermanence of memory and myth. Algae, as silent witnesses to environmental and historical trauma, persist as living archives, offering a radical proposition: survival is not a return to the past, but an ongoing process of adaptation and renewal.