Home | News | CNIO Arte brings to the Cervantes Institute in Warsaw art works by great artists created in dialogue with science

CNIO Arte brings to the Cervantes Institute in Warsaw art works by great artists created in dialogue with science

27.11.2024

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Inauguración de 'Diálogos de arte y ciencia' en el Instituto Cervantes de Varsovia. Maria Blasco; ​Ramiro Fernández Bachiller, embajador de España en Polonia; Borja Baselga, director de la Fundación Banco Santander; y Juan de Nieves. / W. Rozenek. Instituto Cervantes Inauguración de 'Diálogos de arte y ciencia' en el Instituto Cervantes de Varsovia. Maria Blasco; ​Ramiro Fernández Bachiller, embajador de España en Polonia; Borja Baselga, director de la Fundación Banco Santander; y Juan de Nieves. / W. Rozenek. Instituto Cervantes

The Cervantes Institute in Warsaw is now hosting the exhibition Dialogues between art and science, a selection of works by contemporary Spanish artists created from the research of leading international scientists in their field. The art works were created as part of CNIO Arte, an initiative run by the National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) with the support of Fundación Banco Santander to promote the relationship between art and science.

The exhibition will run until 21 January next year.

Front of the Cervantes Institute in Warsaw, with the banner for CNIO Arte. / Juan de Nieves. CNIO

At each edition of CNIO Arte held since 2018, artists Eva Lootz; Chema Madoz; Carmen Calvo; Daniel Canogar; Susana Solano; Amparo Garrido and Dora García have worked respectively with biochemist Margarita Salas; quantum physicist Ignacio Cirac; paleoanthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga; computational biologist Sarah Teichmann; epidemiologist Pedro Alonso; Nobel Prize winning biologist Elizabeth Blackburn; and macro-ecologist David Nogués-Bravo.

The resulting art works have been exhibited at the contemporary art fair ARCO Madrid and elsewhere, as well as at CNIO itself, and have given rise to the travelling exhibition currently in Warsaw.

Exhibition at the Instituto Cervantes in Warsaw. / W. Rozenek, Instituto Cervantes

At the beginning of 2023, Dialogues Between Art and Science was shown at the Cervantes Institute in New York. It then went to the Spanish embassy in the US, in Washington, and the Cervantes Institute in Chicago until the start of this year.

The exhibition includes original art works by Eva Lootz; Chema Madoz; Carmen Calvo; Amparo Garrido and Dora García. The pieces by Daniel Canogar and Susana Solano are shown via video.

Dialogues between art and science at the Cervantes Institute in Warsaw. /W. Rozenek, Instituto Cervantes

“Both science and art are crucial to our understanding of the world”

The CNIO Arte project is based on one fundamental principle: both science and art are crucial to our understanding of the world, and both can inspire each other. As Maria A. Blasco, director of CNIO and executive director of CNIO Arte, points out: “Scientists and artists have always looked straight into the unknown, into the darkness, and we have not been afraid to enter it, with an open mind, in order to learn, to see beyond.”

CNIO director Maria Blasco./W. Rozenek, Instituto Cervantes


The director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, writes in the catalogue for this travelling exhibition: “When they come together, the arts and sciences come closer than ever to it. The truth, that shiver that illuminates and brings us back to the path of being better human beings, always uniting truth and beauty, as the poet would have it.”

Margarita Salas: “A country without research is a country without a future”

The documentation that accompanies the exhibition also includes quotations from the scientists participating in the programme, which allude to the topic that the work at this edition addresses. Liz Blackburn says that “it makes sense to wonder if exercise, healthy eating and meditation, for example, are effective in preserving our telomeres.” Juan Luis Arsuaga states that “there is no, nor can there be, humanity without art.” Sara Teichmann, whose work in the Human Cell Atlas has just been published in Nature, says: “I liked programming; my vision of biology is global, at the scale of the genome.”

Pedro Alonso recalls that “90% of the world’s budget for research and development goes on diseases that affect the richest sectors of the global population (…) which leaves some of the diseases that most affect humanity orphaned.” The physicist Ignacio Cirac explains that to enter the quantum scale is to enter “a new world, a microscopic world that we learn to manipulate and control and in which new laws of nature appear.”

And, to conclude, the forceful utterance of Margarita Salas, pioneer of molecular biology in Spain and the scientist who inaugurated the CNIO Arte programme: “A country without research is a country without a future”.

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