Jura Shust: Żywica*Solar Plexus

Żywica*Solar Plexus is the largest institutional exhibition to date and the first solo presentation in Poland of Jura Shust — a Belarusian artist who has lived in Berlin for years. Living in forced emigration, the artist continually returns — both in thought and in his artistic practice — to his homeland: the city of Maladzyechna and the Polish-Belarusian-Lithuanian borderland region. For centuries, this area was inhabited by people known as the Tutejsi — the "locals," those "from here," who did not identify unambiguously with any modern national identity, remaining more strongly bound to local traditions, language, and belief systems. At the same time, this place belongs to one of the most ecologically distinctive areas of Europe, as it connects several large biomes and ecosystems: primeval forest, of which the Białowieża Forest is the fullest example, wetland landscapes, and transitional forests bordering the taiga.

In many Eastern European Slavic and Finno-Ugric belief systems, the forest constituted a sacred space — a place where the human and non-human worlds interpenetrated, a threshold to the spiritual realm and a site of healing practices. In folk tradition, it was believed that every person had a "tree twin," and that after death, souls inhabited the crowns of trees, whose trunks became bridges between the earthly world and the afterlife. The forest thus appeared as a spiritualised and eschatological space, enabling contact with ancestral spirits and divine beings. Drawing on research in ethnobotany and ethnoreligion, the artist reflects on the phenomena of shamanism and animism, whose traces have survived in the folk culture of the region — in beliefs, rituals, cultural texts, and, in transformed form, in the contemporary collective imagination. Recurring motifs in his work include the world tree, the tree of life, the confidant tree, and the genealogical tree, as well as rites of passage connected with the changing of seasons and funeral ceremonies.

Jura Shust's practice, while rooted in a specific identity, biological, and geopolitical position, simultaneously takes up questions of a universal nature: the lost relationship between humans and nature, the need for spirituality, and the building of cross-species community in the face of crises caused by extractivist capitalism, militarisation, and growing social polarisation. In the spirit of decolonial reflection, the artist challenges the dominant vision of modernity — its imperative of progress, development, and modernisation based on the logic of extraction and accumulation, which too often entailed the severing of centuries-old, respect-based relationships with nature and the depreciation of non-European knowledge systems. At the same time, he poses the question of whether a different way of thinking about technology and artificial intelligence is possible.