Jagna Ciuchta's first monograph reflects the collective, reflexive and evolving logic of the artist's work.
This publication looks back on the past twelve years of a polymorphic practice that continuously reconfigures itself by feeding off of previous projects and their documentation. Since 2011, her work has expanded and become more complex through the inclusion of other artists in her often-evolving installations. In the form of exhibitions, photographs, and occasionally fictional texts, Ciuchta's works set up a confusion of temporalities, spaces, registers, self and others in a kind of ambivalent hospitality. Dilated I, Liquid Images and Carnivorous Plants reflects the collective, reflexive and evolving logic of Ciuchta's work. It opens with a visual essay which, by combining contributions by invited artists with images from Ciuchta's own photographic archive, reiterates the experience of shared authorship that defines her work. It then gathers six new essays examining key moments in her work, her process, methodologies and work ethic together with twenty portfolios of images organized to reflect the singularity of each of the artist's projects.
Jagna Ciuchta (born 1977 in Poland) is an artist based in Paris.
"In Jagna Ciuchta's practice, the exhibition is itself a medium, a reflexive space, an artist's playground. This ephemeral work takes place at the heart of what one might call 'an exhibition situation'. Precisely analyzed in its singularity and within
the reality of curatorial paradigms, the place of the exhibition becomes a material for artistic narratives. Likewise relative to such specificities, the guest artists invited by Jagna Ciuchta are given license to create in situ works, their pieces appear through citation (for example, in photos), 're-exist' in new arrangements and contexts; the collection of these occurrences come together in a single project, their paths cross again later, forming patterns… Chapter after chapter – from exhibition to exhibition – , the work unfolds, is stratified and ramified, affirming its organic nature.
Jagna Ciuchta's productions, whose minimalist aesthetics flirt with expressionist and even baroque accents, are reinvented ad libitum, composing a vast work in progress. To be formalistic, the work also questions the gaps and connections that may now exist between the artwork and its exhibition, between the visible and the invisible, between the high and low – all symptoms of our contemporary schizoid condition which induces a bursting diffraction of the real.
More than a simple reappropriation of the exhibition and its topical elements (already a classic subject of modernity), the beauty of the process hangs on a deft historical and contextual analysis that leaves nothing to chance and simultaneously opens possibilities for those 'chance meetings' that were so dear to the Surrealists.
Here, we feel as we do when watching a tightrope walker advance along a wire, remaining upright largely thanks to his intelligent sensitivity to the environment – suspense, tension, and poetry are all manifest. Viscerally material, in movement,
in continuous becoming, the subtle, radical, uncompromising art of Jagna Ciuchta is an approach from within."
Chrystelle Desbordes
