The exhibition Year Without a Winter explores humanity's complex relationship with climate change and modern technology, and the thin line separating science from fiction.

Inspired by a historical event in 1816 – the year without a summer – the project draws a parallel between the aftermath of the Tambora volcano eruption and today's rapidly escalating climate crisis. While the Tambora eruption cooled the planet, plunging the world into a temporary climate disruption, our current trajectory is characterized by rising global temperatures, hotter summers, and increasingly milder winters in Europe. What might a year without winter look like? What ethical dilemmas arise in the face of looming climate disasters?

The works of three artists—Asa Lee, Sara Lewi and Lena Seiz—open up a multidimensional perspective so as to start tackling these questions. Each adopts a different view on climate change, meteorological control and human interference with nature.

Sara Lewi draws on art history to examine the mechanisms of memory and the processes that sees the landscapes vanish. A winter landscape painted by Julian Fałat in 1907, an image deeply entrenched in the collective consciousness, is her point of departure. The artist creates her own series of drawings inspired by that motif, reiterating it both based on direct observation and recollection. In this fashion, the process of drawing becomes an act of remembering and recreating an image of the world that is slowly disappearing. In Winter 1931, Lewi takes advantage of found archival photographs to prompt reflection on the fleeting nature of memories, the inevitable oblivion, and the role of photography as a medium that captures time and documents change.

Lena Seiz brings a more intuitive and subtle perspective to the exhibition. Her ephemeral pieces create a special atmosphere, reflecting the fragile boundary between exploitation and ecology, as in the projection of gently swirling white smoke, inspired by New York’s steam system—the largest in the world, operating continuously since 1882. In Seiz’s take, this vast infrastructure, used for heating, cooling and humidity control, becomes the epitome of urban efficiency and an arena of constant tension between pragmatic outcomes and their environmental aftermath.

The exhibition closes with Asa Lee’s video projection Cloudmakers, a fascinating analysis at the intersection of art and science. Combining fact and fiction, the artist seeks to determine how weather can be controlled. An AI-generated voice narrates the story from a first-person perspective, interweaving the work of Wilhelm Reich, a mid-20th-century scientist who claimed that atmospheric phenomena may be manipulated, with findings from contemporary meteorological research. Through a fusion of the artist’s own footage with visualizations and narration generated by artificial intelligence, the work blurs the boundaries between the real and the imagined. Her work becomes a reflection on the nature of art, the creative act and the ethical consequences of technological interference with the environment, provoking questions about humanity’s impact on the shape of the planet.

Year Without a Winter does not offer viewers the easy solace of aesthetic contemplation. On the contrary, this seemingly pleasant form of artistic expression serves as a catalyst that triggers anxiety and intellectual discomfort. We are compelled to constantly confront what we see, to repeatedly verify and examine the narratives and perspectives we encounter. The realization that the relationships between humanity, climate, technology and nature are complex and intricate translates into an invitation to lasting reflection and ethical responsibility where uncertain future looms.

Asa Lee, Sara Lewi and Lena Seiz are fictional artists created by Aleksandra Cieślewicz.


Photos: Joanna Czarnota