Agnieszka Kurant: Risk Landscape

Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean is pleased to announce the exhibition Risk Landscape by Agnieszka Kurant (b. 1978, Łódź, Poland). Including a series of five new commissions and recent works, the exhibition explores the unpredictability of the future by suggesting the challenges faced by seemingly rational systems of predictive data and technology. Through her experimental work, the New York-based artist examines the future as a speculative object and proposes a new understanding of how forecasts can influence—yet never fully anticipate—the course of nature, economy and politics.

Kurant comments: “One of my points of departure is the fact that today the future is being turned into speculative real estate. This exhibition is about the traces of the future in the present and the technologies that are speculating about or exploiting various kinds of futures.”

Beginning with the site-specific work Future (Invention) (2024), spread along the glass corridor leading to the luminous Henry J. and Erna D. Leir Pavilion, Kurant explores the diversity of spacial representations of futurity in various cultures through a constellation of the word “future” translated into fourteen languages including Aymara, Maori, Darija, Malagasy and Yupno, which conceive of the future as coming from behind, above or below and not as being in front of us, as Western worldviews do. On the ground floor, Kurant investigates the impact of collective intelligence on the evolution of life forms, minerals and economic and ecological systems. The sculptures A.A.I. (System’s Negative (2016) consist of zinc casts of the interiors of termite mounds, which emerged from the inputs of millions of insects to serve as habitats of these animal worker societies. Chemical Garden (2021–ongoing) evolves throughout the duration of the exhibition, with plant-like crystalline structures emerging from a mixture of inorganic chemicals: salts of metals used as components in computers. In Alien Internet (2023, co-produced with Kunstverein Hannover), a digital-biological-geological assemblage, Kurant employs ferrofluid – a shape-shifting material invented for NASA in 1963—to model a perpetually evolving cybernetic organism, digitally controlled in an electromagnetic field and constantly altered by the behaviour and communication of millions of animals captured with digital technologies around the globe. Post-Fordite (2024) materialises a recently discovered natural-artificial geological formation, which emerged through the fossilisation of automotive paint at now-defunct car factories. Sentimentite (2022) is a new mineral that Kurant created on a molecular level by pulverising and mixing together objects used as informal or official currencies throughout human civilisation. The liquid-crystal painting Conversions (2023) physically reacts to changes in society through quasi-alchemical transmutations of energy and form. The composition and colour of the liquid crystals that make up its painted surface are constantly evolving in response to data collected with artificial intelligence algorithms from social media accounts of members of protest movements around the globe, who express ideas and emotions about changing the world and the future. Millions of people cause changes in the appearance of this artwork.

Drawing upon traces from human activity, a series of sculptures on display speculate on future economic value. Risk Landscape (2024) borrows its title from financial risk management strategies, where it describes an assessment of measurable and unmeasurable uncertainties and threats, and risks exposure of assets. Working with data scientists and catastrophe modeling specialists, Kurant employed artificial intelligence to develop the forms of three holograms showcasing simulations of financial, political and climate events predicted to arise in specific geographic areas around the world, including Luxembourg.

On the pavilion’s lower floor, Lottocracy (2024) draws its title from a radical concept in political economy and governance, proposing that parliamentary elections should be replaced by selection by lottery or sortition. This lotto machine installation reveals a series of statistics, from the risk of being struck by lightning to the odds of an artist not having any income from their art, or the possibility of winning the Mega Millions lottery jackpot. The work playfully shows that risk or chance is as democratic as it gets, by picking up new balls for the audience at regular intervals. Lottocracy is presented next to the maps Risk Management (2020) and Quasi-Objects (2024). The first presents irrational collective behaviour that unexplainably appeared in the history of humanity, while the second traces the creation and circulation of games in the world and uses artificial intelligence to predict other potential games that could have evolved. Concluding the exhibition, Future Anterior (2007) is a New York Times issue from June 2020 with news predicted by a professional clairvoyant in 2007, rendered as a full issue of the newspaper, printed with thermochromic pigments appearing and disappearing according to the weather.

Built around the notion of ‘futurity’, understood as the ability to project oneself into the future while taking into account a present situation, the exhibition reflects Kurant’s long-lasting interest in the future of creation, described as ‘a multitude of agents: a polyphony or a collective intelligence, involving minerals, microorganisms, humans, viruses and algorithms.’ Playing with tools used to predict the future, Kurant questions the way in which predictions can succeed or fail to model the future. With Risk Landscape, the artist also explores linear and non-linear evolution, paving the way for alternative futures. Investigating the technologies that monitor, measure and monetise daily life and the world around us, Kurant was particularly interested to work in Luxembourg: “Luxembourg is currently among the countries with the highest GDP per capita in the world. It could be seen as a country of investment and speculation and of economic fictions. It is therefore a perfect place to experiment with futurity.”

Curator: Sarah Beaumont

Public programme/events
Wednesday, June 5, 2024: Agnieszka Kurant will present “The analog and digital in contemporary art” at the Mudam Akademie
Wednesday, July 24, 2024: a guided tour by exhibition curator Sarah Beaumont

The exhibition is organised with the support of the Polish Institute, Cultural service of the Embassy of Poland in Brussels and the Kunstverein Hannover.