Agnieszka Kurant
A.A.I.11, 2015
Termite mound created by a termite colony, coloured sand, gold, crystals and glitter
60 Γ 48 inch
About the work
Remarkably, what you see here was not created by the artist alone. A.A.I.11 emerged through the collective intelligence of a termite colony.
Without following a predetermined plan, the termites respond to one anotherβs behaviour. A single collective sculpture thus emerges from countless individual actions.
For this work, Kurant collaborated with entomologists from the University of Florida. The termites were provided with unusual materials such as coloured sand, gold, crystals and glitter.
The work therefore raises a fundamental question: who is the actual author? The artist, the scientists or the termites?
For Kurant, the termite mound serves as a model for collective production. Just as a termite mound is built through countless individual contributions, something valuable can also emerge in our society without any one person having designed the whole.
A.A.I.11 thus blurs the boundaries between nature and culture, individual creation and collective authorship. Kurant works across disciplines and explores themes such as value, authorship, production and the circulation of goods. She describes this as the βeconomy of the invisibleβ.
Agnieszka Kurant
Β° 1978 in ΕΓ³dΕΊ, Poland. She lives and works in New York. She studied in ΕΓ³dΕΊ, Warsaw and London.
Kurant was an Artist Fellow at the Berggruen Institute (2019β2021), a Visiting Artist at MIT CAST (2017β2020) and a fellow at the Smithsonian Institution (2018). She was also an artist in residence at Art Explora in Paris (2022) and a Visiting Artist at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University (2023).
Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Palais de Tokyo, Tate Modern, Witte de With, Stroom Den Haag, Moderna Museet and MoMA PS1. In 2010, her work was presented in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Mudam Luxembourg (2024), Kunstverein Hannover (2023), Kunsthal Gent (2023) and Castello di Rivoli (2021β2022). Her work has also been presented internationally at institutions including MoMA in New York; the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo and Bourse de Commerce β Pinault Collection in Paris; SFMOMA; Gropius Bau; Kunsthalle Wien; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, as well as at the Istanbul, Gwangju and Sydney biennials.
In 2015, Kurant created a work for the faΓ§ade of the Guggenheim Museum, and in 2021β2022 she completed a permanent commission for the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge. She has received several distinctions, including the LACMA Art + Technology Award (2020), the Frontier Art Prize (2019) and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2018).