Jagna Ciuchta: The Fold of the Cosmic Belly

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.