Iva Hladis: Origins Extinct Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Sep 10 2005

Location: 

Czechoslovakia

Iva Hladis was born in Czechoslovakia in 1965.
​In 2005 her attention turned to the issue of global warming and world destruction with a new series of artworks titled “Origins Extinct”; assemblages of used computer chipboards, real botanicals, bugs, Czech glass beads, found objects, wires and pearls.
ORIGINS EXTINCT artist statement : Just as the new millennium began so did my work on the “Origins Extinct” series, and when the book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond arrived at bookstores the concept for the series was sealed. But it was long before this that I felt an urgency about the condition of our environment and the need to change our ways of living.
As I was finishing my “Origins Extinct: Time Line” piece several weeks ago, the media and United Nations caught up on the facts of our rapid decline. Every piece of my art in this series carries a warning message, and my Time Line piece tells the story from the beginning (the Big Bang) to the end (global extinction). All of the important time points of historical events and scientific research suggest how out of balance and out of touch with nature we have become, and how little time we have left. Pleading ignorance can no longer be an excuse for not acting.

External sources: 

https://www.ivahladis.com/art
https://calabigallery.com/artists/iva-hladis/
Posted by Mingke Zhao on Apr 7 2021

Staff rating: 

0

Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Amplifies (issue or campaign)Brings public and political attention to an issue or campaign.  Can include prefigurative action, making the invisible visible.

Timeframe For change

This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear long-term goal. Long-term goals tend to be things like: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.
The artwork focuses on a big issue: environment and nature. The materials used demonstrates her exploration on the relationship between human-made wastes (e-waste) and natural environment.

Notes

It is hard to say how it is effective to improve the environment. But the artwork does display the contradiction between human and nature. The leaves are beautiful and the chipboard seems strange.