The evolving dialogue between human creativity and the living processes of nature are at the core of the exhibition “Natura Naturans: Human Beings, Nature, Landscape” which is being presented in the frame of the International Media Art Festival CYFEST 17, for the first time in Greece, at the MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts, in Warehouse B1 at the Port of Thessaloniki, from 27 November 2025 until 25 January 2026.
Tracing the enduring impulse of the Organic Art avant-garde movement, the exhibition considers how its radical visions of form and perception are reimagined through today’s expanded artistic tools—algorithmic systems, kinetic structures, immersive environments, and participatory practices. Bringing together twentieth-century works from the Costakis Collection of the MOMus-Museum of Modern Art and the Frants Family Collection with new projects by over 20 international artists presented by CYLAND MediaArtLab and MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts, “Natura Naturans: Human Beings, Nature, Landscape” reveals how the avant-garde’s experimental ethos continues to shape our understanding of movement, materiality, and the interconnectedness of all living systems.
The dialogue begins with the artists of the Costakis Collection, whose work marks the birth of the Organic Art movement in Soviet Leningrad in the mid-1920s — a movement represented today in the collection of the MOMus-Museum of Modern Art. Its founders cultivated an extraordinary sensitivity to the living rhythms of the world.
The Frants Family Collection reflects the art of Leningrad-Saint Petersburg from the 20th century up to the present day, and it contains paintings, graphic works and sculpture of both major, universally recognized authors and less known, but highly original artists.
In the contemporary section of Natura Naturans, the organic worldview of the avant-garde finds its technological echo. Artists translate the language of living systems into new media, reimagining perception through data, light, and sound.
The exhibition “Natura Naturans: Human Beings, Nature, Landscape” envisions a world where the boundaries between the living and the artificial, the organic and the digital, dissolve into a shared field of generative activity. Here, nature understood as natura naturans — nature that creates — resonates with the logic of computational and networked processes. Both operate as open, self-organizing systems in constant flux. The artists in this exhibition treat data and code not as tools of control but as living materials that evolve, react, and interact — creating an art of collaboration rather than representation, where human and nonhuman forces co-produce aesthetic experience.
Artists on show
Alexandra Dementieva, Alexei Kostroma, Andrey Smirnov, Anna Frants, Elena Gubanova, Eric Vernhes, Ivan Govorkov, Jaanika Peerna, Katerina Moschou, Linda Loh, Maria Varela, Mariateresa Sartori, Max Blotas, Nataliya Lyakh, Tuula Närhinen, Valery Koshlyakov.
Exhibition details
MOMus–Experimental Center for the Arts
Warehouse B1, Pier A, Thessaloniki port area, Thessaloniki, Greece, 54110
27 November 2025–25 January 2026