Aether's Long Roots

In The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), anthropologist Anna Tsing describes how “pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other’s world-making projects possible.” Rather than understanding ourselves as responsible for taming, mastering, and subjugating the natural world, Tsing encourages readers to see our interconnectedness with the environment as a foundational part of what it is to be human animals; more expansively, as thrilling, rangy, anarchic, capable of surprising convergences and new becomings. This attention to the unexpected interplay of beings, and the ways in which living things alter their surroundings unites the work of Alicja Biała and Diana Orving.

Nature might revitalize human thinking, both artists imply, but such a realignment is only possible if we cease to see the natural world as merely a resource to be exploited. Both Biała and Orving reveal—with a tenderness, playfulness and ingenuity that matches their subject—the risks and rewards of our fundamentally and irrevocably interconnected lives. Biała works primarily with acid-etched painting on brass, Orving with sculpted textile, but they share a deeply felt preoccupation with the natural world and our entanglement within it. Their works look toward instances of adaptation and resurgence that acquire a reparative force in our current context of climate catastrophe, pollution, and mass extinction. At a moment when the livability of the planet feels increasingly tenuous, there is a radical optimism to Biała’s and Orving’s perspectives, and to their attention to the simple yet consistently miraculous conditions of existence: the intelligence of a plant’s sensory networks; the body’s capacity to make and sustain new life. Their works insist upon the persistent, often improbable force of aliveness.

Aether’s Long Roots, an exhibition featuring Polish multimedia artist Alicja Biała and Swedish sculptor Diana Orving, opens at CARVALHO the evening of Friday, September 18, from 6 – 9pm, with the artists in attendance. Comprised of acid-etched paintings by Biała and site-responsive suspended textile sculptures by Orving, the exhibition spans both gallery spaces across 110 and 112 Waterbury St. in Brooklyn. Aether’s Long Roots marks Orving’s second exhibition with CARVALHO and Biała’s first US gallery show. The exhibition remains on view through October 24, 2026.

Text by Rebecca Birrell, PhD. Alicja Biała's installation, Beneath the Soft Ground, Hard Ground, has been loaned by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Poland.

Alicja Biała (b. 1993; Poznań, Poland) is a multidisciplinary artist working across Poland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Biała studied at the Royal Drawing School (2021–22) and holds an MA from Royal College of Art (2022) in London, and a BA from VIA University College in Denmark (2014).

Diana Orving (b. 1985; Stockholm, Sweden) is a Stockholm-based installation artist, working predominantly in textile sculptures. Orving has mounted solo exhibitions at Galleri Anstedt, Östra Karup, Sweden (2026); Virserums Konsthall, Virserum, Sweden (2026); Millesgården, Stockholm, Sweden (2026); CARVALHO, New York (2024), among others.