Agnieszka Kurant

Agnieszka Kurant investigates collective and nonhuman intelligences, the future of labor and creativity, and the exploitations within digital capitalism. Her works are speculative thought experiments, created in collaboration with scientists and philosophers. She sets up complex systems, networks, and structures made of multiple agents (molecules, animals, bacteria, Artificial Intelligence algorithms or crowds of people) who interact to produce hybrid forms undergoing perpetual transformation. Oscillating between biological, digital, and geological, natural and artificial, life and nonlife, her works explore plural subjectivity, the evolution of living systems, culture and technology, transformations of the human, automation and cybernetics.

Born in 1978 in Lodz, Poland, she lives and works in New York. Kurant was an artist fellow at the Berggruen Institute (2019-2021), a visiting artist at MIT CAST (2017-2020), and held a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute (2018). She was an artist in residence at Art Explora in Paris (2022) and a visiting artist at the Moody Center, Rice University (2023).

Her solo shows include Mudam Luxemburg (2024), Castello di Rivoli (2021-2022), Hannover Kunstverein (2023), Kunsthal Gent (2023), and Sculpture Center (2013). In 2015 she realized a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum, and in 2021-22 a permanent commission for the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge.

Her works were also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection and Jeu de Paume, Paris; Istanbul Biennial; Gwangju Biennial, the Biennale of Sydney, Milano Triennale; Dhaka Art Summit, SFMOMA, Gropius Bau, Kunsthalle Wien, Witte de With; Whitechapel Art Gallery, the De Young Museum, Louisiana Museum, Denmark; Villa Medici, Rome; Nottingham Contemporary, Moderna Museet; the Kitchen, Gamec, Bergamo, CAPC Bordeaux, Bonner Kunstverein; Frieze Projects, London and Performa Biennial. In 2010 she co-authored the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (with Aleksandra Wasilkowska). 

She was the recipient of the 2020 LACMA A+T Award, the 2019 Frontier Art Prize, the Pollock-Krasner Grant Award (2018), Google AMI Grant (2022), and Montehermoso Art and Research Award (2011). Her monograph Collective Intelligence, co-edited by Stefanie Hessler and Jenny Jaskey will be published by Sternberg Press/ MIT Press in June 2025.