Lecture

SculptureCenter, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, presents the artist-led lecture series Subjective Histories of Sculpture. Initiated in 2006, the series explores how contemporary artists think about sculpture, its history, legacies, and potential for innovation.

This year, Martin Kersels, Agnieszka Kurant, and Allison Smith are presenting their own take on art history within the framework of the Vera List Center’s curatorial theme Thingness. With sculpture as point of departure and source of inspiration, they explore the material conditions of our lives. Engaging with a rich collection of social, cultural and political associations, the artists consider the body as a performative object, consider objects for the construction of identity, and negotiate the tension and translation between material and immaterial experience. Citing specific works or bodies of work, texts, and personal anecdotes taken from inside and outside cultural production – and inside and outside Art – these subjective, incomplete, partial, or otherwise eclectic histories propose alternative methods for understanding sculpture’s evolving strategies.

Agneiszka Kurant’s practice aligns with conceptualism, as she investigates both visible and imagined dualities at the core of social, economic and political systems in the world. Often engaging in collaboration with professionals in diverse disciplines – scientists, inventors, or journalists – Kurant seeks to explore gaps in logic that confuse and inform our understanding of real and fictitious realities. Her projects take interest in virtual capital, imaginary property, immaterial labor, and hybrid forms of authorship as well as the politicized value and status of objects.

Born in 1978, Kurant is based in Warsaw and currently resides in New York. She represented Poland at the 2010 Venice Biennale, in a collaboration with the architect Aleksandra Wasilkowska. Kurant has also participated in numerous international group and solo exhibitions at the Witte de With, Rotterdam; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, Zacheta; and the 2009 Performa Biennial, New York, among others. Kurant was an artist-in-residence at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2004; ISCP, New York, in 2005; and at the Paul Klee Center in Bern in 2009.

Presented on the occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 curatorial focus theme Thingness.

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