Agnieszka Kurant (Łódź, 1978) is an artist who is not an artist. Or rather, not to be approached in the most common ways of identifying “art-making”. «Art schools are boring» is, not by chance, one of the first phrases uttered during a brief chat with her and which serves as a more than adequate tool for understanding the process of artistic creation that goes well beyond, or rather undermines the foundations of the stereotyped and annoyingly elitist “ivory tower” in which it is usually confined. Indeed, one of the essential aspects that fuels Kurant’s practice is her willingness to be open to the most diverse interactions with a very wide range of fields and professionals. Co-authors of Kurant’s works can be scientists, economists, researcher and so on, capable of creating elaborations in which, from premises based on a scientific method, one arrives at results in which the “whole” is, each time, something that goes beyond the simple sum of the parts, giving rise to results that are beyond the artist’s control. It is this thirst for knowledge, or “connection to knowledge”[1], to borrow Hans Ulrich Obrist’s words on the subject, that gives Kurant’s practice the qualities of constant openness to dialogue and the most diverse forms of learning and collaboration. An invitation, in short, to embrace the diverse in its full complexity..
View of the exhibition “Agnieszka Kurant. Risk Landscape”, 07.06.2024 — 05.01.2025, Mudam Luxembourg. Photo: Mareike Tocha © Mudam Luxembourg
Hosted within the Henry J. and Erna D. Leir Pavilion in of Mudam museum in Luxembourg, “Risk Landscape” – curated by Sarah Beaumont – borrows terminology related to the field of risk management to explore the concept of speculation around the idea of future, configuring artistic practice as a concrete tool for defining possible alternative scenarios. In this regard the artist declares: «One of my departure points is the fact that today the future is being turned into speculative real estate. This exhibition is about the traces of the future in the present and the technologies that are speculating about or exploiting various kinds of futures». Opening the exhibition, in the corridor in front of the pavilion, we find “Future (Invention)” (2024), in which Kurant scatters the walls and floor with various translations of the word “future” (including terminologies ranging from the Maori language to Malagasy or Mayara), highlighting how the idea of the future does not necessarily have to be anchored to the purely Western linearity – such that it is inevitably projected into a temporal space after the past-present consequentiality – but can be formalised by different cultures as something more all-encompassing, multidirectional and complete using a spatial configuration that envelops the perceptive action of the observer.
View of the exhibition “Agnieszka Kurant. Risk Landscape”, 07.06.2024 — 05.01.2025, Mudam Luxembourg. Photo: Mareike Tocha © Mudam Luxembourg
However, it is works such as “Chemical Garden” (2021 – ongoing), “Alien Internet” (2023) and “Conversions” (2023) that exalt the transversality and thematic breadth of Kurant’s practice as well as that sense of “temporal ubiquity”, such that one is a spectator of a constant oscillation between an idea of past, present and future, stripped of any interpretative rigidity to instead leave room for a continuous multidirectional flow. “Chemical Garden” presents itself as an ecosystem of crystalline structures generated from the interaction of inorganic chemical material, in particular metal salts found in computer components. “Alien Internet”, on the other hand, is a structure based on the use of ferrofluid – a black inorganic substance invented by NASA in 1963 that is composed of nanoparticles capable of reacting to electromagnetic impulses – to create a system that can constantly change about the changing behaviour of millions of animals tracked around the world. Similarly, “Conversions” is a structure of liquid crystals whose shapes and colours vary thanks to the use of a mechanism based on the use of artificial intelligence, the aim of which is to collect and analyse data linked to the detection, on social media, of sentiments linked to the desire for change and expressed by various protest groups. This kind of works does not aspire to any desire for completeness or sense of stale accomplishment, but to an intense exchange between inside and outside.
View of the exhibition “Agnieszka Kurant. Risk Landscape”, 07.06.2024 — 05.01.2025, Mudam Luxembourg. Photo: Mareike Tocha © Mudam Luxembourg
A dynamic and constantly evolving dialogue with the “world outside” such as to evoke that idea of the museum as a power station (kraftwerk) expressed by Alexander Dorner in “The Beyond Art”, that is, as an entity capable of capturing and restoring that flow of magmatic evolution and change of which the essence of reality is constituted. Even though Kurant elevates the scientific method to the founding principle of their constitution, the works are animated by a becoming and vitality with almost alchemistic properties, translating into the artistic expression of a spasmodic desire to know what exists and crumbling, almost on a Fluxus 2.0 line, those fictitious boundaries between art and life. The abandonment of linearity for an evolutionary development, leaving room for the imaginative capacity of many different possible futures, underlies the creation of works such as “Sentimentite” (2022) with which Kurant stages a dystopian-sounding prediction related to the idea of currency and its use. The sculpture is a new mineral resulting from the pulverisation and assembly of objects (from shells, cigarettes, bones and so on) used throughout history as material for economic exchange. A speculative desire that also permeates “Air Rights 7” (2021), the remains of a meteorite presented in a state of levitation and harking back to that practice of private individuals or organisations claiming ownership of parts of planets, satellites or other components of space.
View of the exhibition “Agnieszka Kurant. Risk Landscape”, 07.06.2024 — 05.01.2025, Mudam Luxembourg. Photo: Mareike Tocha © Mudam Luxembourg
On the lower floor, the same thematic line is followed by “Risk Landscape” (2024). The title is borrowed from that sphere of risk management linked to the activities of forecasting scenarios, more or less quantifiable, connected to the occurrence of natural disasters, financial crises or geopolitical conflicts. The work is formalised in three holograms created with the collaboration of data scientists and experts in the activities of forecasting and formulating models linked to catastrophic events. Like windows onto hypothetical tomorrows, the work, with an almost spectral quality, stages simulations of events of a climatic, financial and political nature in three precise contexts, Mudam in Luxembourg, the Gaza Strip in Palestine and Lviv in Ukraine. “Lottocracy” (2024), on the other hand, is a mechanism that plays on the concepts of chance, risk and probability. One is faced with a machine containing a multitude of coloured balls, each of which has been associated with a certain event together with the probability of its actual occurrence (such as, for example, the probability of being struck by lightning). At regular intervals, an automated system extracts different groupings each time, highlighting, with the same dryness of a lottery, how a certain type of risk and probability is, in the long run, more frequent than others, bringing out that human “mismatch” between what is unconsciously considered more likely or less likely than what happens. “Risk Management” (2020) is instead structured based on a mapping process. The first reports a whole series of peculiar events and collective phenomena recorded over 1,000 years (such as the 1518 epidemic recorded in Strasbourg that made 400 people dance obsessively for several days), suggesting how, despite the adoption of a data collection process based on a scientific method, the intrinsically ambiguous nature of the subject matter cannot but result in a sense of total uncertainty regarding the possible future developments of such phenomena. Again, therefore, the stark contrast between research with analytical rigour and the realisation of powerlessness about the possibility of looking beyond the present time with any kind of certainty.
View of the exhibition “Agnieszka Kurant. Risk Landscape”, 07.06.2024 — 05.01.2025, Mudam Luxembourg. Photo: Mareike Tocha © Mudam Luxembourg
Similarly, “Quasi-Objects” (2024) reports a mapping of the various types of games that have developed around the world, even going so far as to conceive new ones. Based on the concept that the game, its conception and changes are the result of collective action, Kurant redefines global boundaries and idealises a scenario entirely regulated by game dynamics. To conclude the journey, this logic of the unpredictable is further enhanced by “Future Anterior” (2007), eight pages of the New York Times created in 2007 with the contribution of a clairvoyant and ghostwriters to try to hypothesise what the content might be in 2020. From the collapse of the European Union to the near zeroing of the Amazon rainforest, Kurant’s “prophetic” intentions are reconciled with the use of thermo-chromatic pigments that vary the visibility of the text according to temperature levels. Fortunately, there are those who, like Agnieszka Kurant, still believe in the need to be open to the different, to dialogue with the other, to a real desire for coexistence and the abandonment of pretensions to strict authorship in the knowledge that it is in the ideals of openness and sharing that one can find a sense of completeness. Kurant embarks on the path of an artistic action that does not limit itself to a simple passive registration but instead puts into practice a courageous will to come to terms with the world.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/t-magazine/agnieszka-kurant-art.html
Info:
Agnieszka Kurant. Risk Landscape
07/06/2024 – 05/01/2025
Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean
3, Park Dräi Eechelen
L-1499 Luxembourg-Kirchberg
www.mudam.com
With a specialist degree in Economics and Management of Cultural Heritage, passionate about the field of Contemporary art, its economic dimension and, more generally, the dynamics characterizing the art market, Gabriele has gained experience over time in contexts such as contemporary art galleries, start-ups and Art Advisory. He currently works in the Art-Rite auction house as an assistant in the department of Modern and Contemporary art.
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