Jagna Ciuchta: The Fold of the Cosmic Belly
This exhibition is coproduced with the Center of art image/imatge, Orthez
Since 2011, through invitations to other artists to participate in her own practice, Jagna Ciuchta’s work has developed and increased in complexity. Her scalable practice, presented as group exhibitions, is a vector for affective and aesthetic relationships that are indissociable from the economic and institutional aspects of her practice, as well as its relationship to its milieu. Driven by a desire for real, symbolic and aesthetic autonomy vis-à-vis the institutional framework, Jagna Ciuchta defines her own monstration and documentation tools. Her works stage the confusion between real and fantasised registers, internal and external spaces, the self and others in a radical form of hospitality. Using the motif of incorporating works that she immerses in her scenographies or photographs, Jagna Ciuchta dons the invisible role of the curator—she speaks of “naive curating”—playing with the fringes of the institutions where her work is displayed. Her hospitality, marked by a certain eroticism, in the sense of a desire for contact, envelopment, or even absorption, leads to a sort of self-effacement, a continual shift and unstable forms.
Jagna Ciuchta’s mechanisms are constantly evolving; she continually reorganises the display transforming her scenography, imbued with its own rhythm, from the opening right until the end of the exhibition. From another perspective revealed by the strong visual presence of the scenography, the invited artists are also contained within her, assimilated, or even digested by her composition. The artist’s omnipotence thus emerges, her arbitrary and emotional choices, her ability to create other value systems, to do things differently to a curator, while remaining fully aware of the risk of reciprocal cannibalisation inherent to the act of welcoming or desiring the other. Jagna Ciuchta’s oeuvre is located in the tension between these two extremes.