Garden of Hope | 28 February - 29 March 2025

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 is a trans-disciplinary artist whose living algae sculptures transform spectators’ breath into oxygen, creating participatory ecosystems that embody the possibilities of interspecies collaboration. Informed by his maritime heritage and free diving experience, Kanic’s practice uses breath as both material and metaphor, accessing cultural, ancestral, and geological memories embedded within algae—Earth’s principal carbon sinks responsible for producing approximately 60% of the planet’s oxygen.

His work envisions a symbiotic future, where living sculptures function as both ecological interventions and speculative gestures toward climate justice. Collaborating with algae as both artistic medium and carbon capture mechanism, Kanic’s practice is grounded in ecofeminist methodologies and posthumanist inquiry, drawing on thinkers like Donna Haraway to cultivate responsibility that “feels for both the human and the non-human.”

Recipient of the Governor General’s Academic Medal, Kanic has received over ten sustainability and fine arts awards since 2023. His work has been exhibited across Canada and featured on TEDx. Kanic has participated in over thirty group exhibitions, with notable exhibitions at Abbozzo Gallery (2021), InterAccess (2022), the Aga Khan Museum (2023) and most recently, at The Power Plant in November, 2024. In addition to his visual arts practice, Kanic is an award-winning filmmaker, an alum of the Locarno Film Academy and Berlinale Talents, with films showcased at over thirty Oscar-qualifying festivals. He is currently completing his MFA in Visual Arts at York University.

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Garden of Hope: Vladimir Kanic | Main Gallery Exhibition

Vladimir Kanic

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