Agnieszka Kurant:
Artists at the Institute
Tuesday 08 September, 2015
6:30pm, $0/Rsvp
Institute of Fine Arts
1 East 78 Street
Taking advantage of the IFA’s location in one of the world’s leading art centers, the Graduate Student Association invites artists to discuss their work at the Institute. Begun in 1983, these talks are now funded by a generous gift in memory of late IFA Professor Kirk Varnedoe, who inspired the series. The series normally includes two presentations per semester. The 2015 - 2016 student coordinators are Anna Blum and Patryk Tomaszewski.
Polish artist, Agnieszka Kurant (b. 1978), began her career after being awarded an MA in creative curating in 2003 from Goldsmiths College, University in London in addition to previous training at the Leon Schiller National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre, and the University of Lodz. Kurant's interdisciplinary oeuvre explores the role and function of the imaginary in our modern-day global society. Often venturing to represent immaterial concepts like authorship, distribution, production, ownership, and value through material manifestations, Kurant's work is highly conceptual and immediately tangible at once. Through Phantom Library (2011-12), a work which consists of a collection of physical copies of books that were never written -- complete with ISBN numbers and cover designs -- but which all previously appeared in other works of literary fiction, Kurant turned fictive ideas into objects of commodity. By employing a strong relational rhetoric, her work probes into the phenomena of virtual capital, shadow economies, and invisible labor among others, examining critical aspects of late capitalism.
Agnieszka Kurant currently participates in "Storylines" at the Guggenheim Museum (through September 9, 2015). Her work was exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2004); Tate Modern, London (2006); Moscow Biennial (2007); Zacheta - National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2009); Performa Biennial, New York (2009, 2013); Witte de With, Centrum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Rotterdam (2011); MoMA PS1, New York (2013). Additionally, she represented Poland in the 2010 Venice Architectural Bienniale in collaboration with Aleksandra Wasilkowska.