ABOUT THE PROJECT
To understand the transformation of the human, says Agnieszka Kurant, we should abandon notions of individual intelligence and analyze exclusively the human as a collective intelligence instead, a contemporary assemblage of social, microbial, and artificial intelligences, among others. Kurant develops works that undermine the division of nature and culture and denounce individual authorship and agency with complex, hybrid, collective forms — for instance, sculptures crowdsourced to termite colonies (A.A.I., 2014-ongoing); sculptures crowdsourced to workers of the online labor platform Amazon Mechanical Turk (Assembly Line, 2017); liquid crystal paintings animated by real-time algorithmic sentiment analysis of Twitter feeds from members of protest movements (Conversions, 2019-2020); and the fusion of thousands of signatures into one (The End of Signature, 2018).
Fathomers is pleased to announce support for Kurant and the publication of Agnieszka Kurant: Collective Intelligence, a conceptual monograph of the most recent decade of the artist’s work. Forthcoming in 2021, it is co-edited by Jenny Jaskey and Stefanie Hessler and co-published by the Berggruen Institute and Sternberg Press.
Clockwise: Post-Fordite, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles (photo: Krzysztof Smaga) / A.A.I, 2017, and Conversions, 2019 and 2020. Courtesy De Young Museum of Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York / Los Angeles. (photo: Randy Dodson) / The End of Signature, 2015. Façade of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (photo: Kristopher McKay) / At top of page: A.A.I. (Artificial Artificial Intelligence), 2017. Termite mounds built by colonies of living termites out of colored sand, gold and crystals. Collaboration with Dr. Paul Bardunias, La Panacee, Montpelier (photo: Aurélien Mole)
ARTIST BIO
Artist Agnieszka Kurant explores how complex social, economic, and ecological systems can operate in ways that confuse distinctions between fiction and reality or nature and culture. Probing collective intelligence, non-human intelligence, and the exploitations of social capital under surveillance capitalism, the artist explores the transformations of the human and the future of labor and creativity in the 21st century.
Kurant is the recipient of the 2020 LACMA Art and Technology Award and the 2019 Frontier Art Prize. She is currently an artist fellow at the Berggruen Institute Transformations of the Human program. In 2018 she was an artist in residence at MIT CAST and held a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute.
Recent exhibitions of work include the Istanbul Biennial; the Milano Triennale; Age of You, at MOCA Toronto; Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI, at the De Young Museum, in San Francisco; and Invisible, at Trinity College, in Dublin. In 2015, Kurant presented a commission for the Guggenheim Museum façade, in New York. In 2013-2014, she presented a major solo exhibition at Sculpture Center, in New York.
Upcoming projects include a major permanent public commission for MIT LIST Art Center in Cambridge (launching June 2021) and projects for Castello di Rivoli, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, as part of Espressioni Part II (November 2021); for Kunsthalle Wien, curated by Diederich Diederichsen, as part of Cybernetics of the Poor (December 2020); and for the Munch Triennale, Oslo (October 2021).
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