GABRIELA BENISH-KALNÁ

Cluster Photography & Print Exhibitor | 2025

ARTWORK FOR PURCHASE AVAILABLE SOON

Gabriela Benish-Kalná (she/they) is a Czech-American multimedia and social practice artist and activist currently running the ArtMill Center for Regenerative Arts in rural Czech Republic. Gabriela BK is the Director of ArtDialog, a non-profit organisation focused on environmental art education and climate adaptation. After graduating from the FAMU Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and working with various social and environmental justice non-profits and grassroots initiatives for over a decade, she is currently focused on co-creating alternative models of coexistence, fostering resilience and safe spaces for human and non-human species, leading international eco-social programs such as Inter-Species Refuge / Transformative Territories.

While her installations are influenced by notions of post-apocalyptic escapism, her photographic and text-based works are primarily solutions-oriented, emphasizing hope-based communication in the face of the climate and geo-political crisis of our time. In her writing she explores the role of arts and culture in the transformation of Euro-Western worldviews and has developed methodologies to catalyze post-humanism as a force of decolonization in academic and art theory discourse.

Solastalgia (/ˌsɒləˈstældʒə/) sōlācium (comfort) -algia (pain, suffering, grief)

Solastalgia refers to the distress humans experience in response to the deterioration of global ecosystems. The World Health Organization has recognized it as a key factor in assessing the impact of climate change on human health and wellbeing. This emotional state is particularly relevant to people directly affected by climate change, spreading throughout society as the transition from comfort to grief is experienced by the wider ecological community, the intertwined web of human and more-than-human species.