Birds of the bowerbird family use fruit, feathers and shiny objects to adorn their bowers and thus lure females. They do this even though they are not lacking in any department to have to make up for it with extra-corporeal appendices. Even so, they strive to beautify themselves through their architecture. Thus, bowerbirds go for what is essentially a prosthetic action. Prostheses may be seen as an aesthetic reorganization and capacity enhancement. These extensions restore the functionality of the body. They become integral, contributing to an organic, albeit partly artificial whole.

All bodies make use of prostheses. Acquiring objects-supplements, they incorporate them and turn them into bodily organs. Using, tools, ornaments and devices, they boost their own potential. Hence, a prosthesis does not merely compensate for a shortcoming, but represents an instrument that enriches the modes of functioning in the world.

Umgebung focuses on the body extensions that use clothing, architecture, food or fuel. Home and apparel are not only a shelter/covering to shield one from the cold or the sun, but also a mode of communication, a camouflage, an intimate space or a component in a gender ornament. Prosthetic objects become borrowed organicity, also in trans-species terms. Leaving anthropocentric individualism behind, the exhibition highlights interspecies connections.

The eponymous “umgebung” means the world around, the surroundings or environment. Following Elisabeth Grosz, Wodzisławski asks “what is that external environment, that context, that setting which stimulates and transforms the individual and collective bodies that inhabit it?” The artist draws attention to the need for conceptual creativity and posthumanist sensibility. He explores the limits of prosthesis and the possibility of constituting oneself anew. He creates a space for becoming familiar with strangeness; he blurs the boundaries between the innate and the chosen. He analyses the sense of artificiality in a post-natural world, employing a peculiar kind of biorecycling. As a result of artistic intervention, natural materials, tissues and biological by-products assume para-utilitarian forms. By modifying them, Wodzisławski arrives at objects on the borderline between organism and object; between aesthetic whim and reified philosophical thought.