Subjective Histories of Sculpture: Agnieszka Kurant

SculptureCenter, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, is thrilled to continue the artist-led lecture series Subjective Histories of Sculpture. This program, initiated in 2006, furthers SculptureCenter's exploration of how contemporary artists think about sculpture, its history, legacies, and potential for innovation.

This year, Martin Kersels, Agnieszka Kurant, and Allison Smith have been invited to present their own take on art history and consider the thematic focus of thingness. Utilizing sculpture as a point of departure and source of inspiration, they explore the material conditions of our lives. Engaging with a rich collection of social, cultural and political associations, these artists consider the body as a performative object, study objects to explore the construction of identity, and negotiate the tension and translation between material and immaterial experience. Citing specific works, bodies of work, texts, and personal anecdotes taken from inside and outside cultural production, and inside and outside "art," these subjective, incomplete, partial, or otherwise eclectic histories question assumptions and propose alternative methods for understanding sculpture's evolving strategies.

Agnieszka Kurant's practice can be categorized under a conceptual aesthetic and relates to "phantom capital" and hybrid status of objects. She is investigating how phantoms, fictions, and rumors influence social, economic and political systems of the contemporary world. She is interested in the hybridity of value, aura, authorship, production and ownership of objects. Analyzing the "unknown unknowns" of knowledge, collective intelligence, immaterial labor, mutations of memes and manipulations of collective consciousness, she seeks to explore gaps in logic that confuse and inform our understanding of real and fictitious realities.

Kurant, born in 1978, is a Polish artist based in New York. She represented Poland at the 2010 Venice Biennale (in collaboration with the architect Aleksandra Wasilkowska). Kurant has also participated in numerous international group and solo exhibitions at the Witte de With, Rotterdam; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Zacheta National Art Gallery; and the 2009 Performa Biennial, New York, among others. Kurant was also selected as the artist in residence at Palais de Tokyo, Paris in 2004; ISCP, New York in 2005; and at the Paul Klee Center (Sommerakademie) in Bern in 2009. Her forthcoming solo shows include an exhibition-project at the Guggenheim Museum New York and a show of newly commissioned work that will be presented by SculptureCenter and Stroom den Haag.