The Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Torun (CoCA) presents Agnieszka Kurant Phantom Capital, an exhibition on view 15 June–1 October 2012.
The personal exhibition of Agnieszka Kurant at CoCA Torun continues the quadrennial series entitled FOCUS POLAND, dedicated to emerging Polish artists and curated by guest curators coming form European museums and contemporary art centres.
Agnieszka Kurant’s practice relates to the “economy of the invisible.” She is interested in the “unknown unknown” of knowledge, “general intellect” and collective intelligence, mutations of memes and manipulations of collective consciousness. Her works reference phenomena such as virtual capital, imaginary property, and immaterial labour. Kurant explores how things created as fictions, rumors, paranormal phenomena, myths, objects not existing materially, enter into the economy of the contemporary world, how even the imaginary or the existence of the future in the present is also colonized, valorized, and politicized.
Agnieszka Kurant is interested in the hybrid status of things: hybridity of value, authorship, production, dispersion, and ownership as well as the aura of objects and the new modes of production, distribution, and dispersion in cognitive capitalism. Her works are often in constant transformation and have shifted their status and meaning in different ways since they were created. They shift forms and formats depending of different quasi-fictional or unexpected factors, parameters, and contexts operating in reality, such as the impact of rumors, fictions, or the weather on economy and politics.
Artist Agnieszka Kurant and curator Joanna Sandell will start a series of researches on signs of our times and the status of our collective memory, starting with the exhibition Phantom Capital at CoCA in Torun which will present new works: Multiverse, Silence is Golden, as well as a translation of Jean Yves Jouannais’ book Artists without Artworks with Kurant’s commentaries. Fragments of the exhibition at CoCA will also be included in Kurant’s solo exhibition-project at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, starting in the fall of 2012.
Curated by Joanna Sandell.