Antje Majewski highlights the role of imagination in shaping a sustainable future through collaborations with scientists and local communities.
Her project A Painting Evolution is a collaborative work created with students of Korean Painting at Pusan National University and visitors to the Sea Art Festival. In dialogue with paleontologist Professor Gi-Soo Nam, the artist selected five types of primitive marine organisms that may have existed in the Busan region. These life forms first appeared during the Ediacaran and Precambrian eras, when evolution rapidly expanded.
Participants are invited to draw ancient organism, using the previous drawing drawn by the other participants. In this project, ten art students repeatedly draw the same ancient organism, each time using the previous drawing drawn by the other participants. A total of fifty-five drawings, completed with the students and the artist, represent both scientific speculation and individual imagination. Edited into a video sequence, this series of images show shifts in form, scale, and color of each organism mirroring the unpredictable flow of evolution, where tiny variations give rise to entirely new beings.
A Painting Evolution is less about artistic authority or control and more about collective practice. It welcomes difference and repetition as a space of continual change, where unforeseen outcomes emerge. In this way, the work reflects evolution itself like open-ended, collaborative, and full of possibility.
