September 17, 2021 – November 27, 2021
Artists: Jagna Ciuchta with Aïcha & Sheila Atala, Miriam Cahn, Patty Chang,Arnaud Cousin, Chloé Dugit-Gros, Allal El Karmoudi, Fadma El Karmoudi,Karima El Karmoudi, Nan Goldin, Nancy Holt, Marta Huba, SuzanneHusky, Graciela Iturbide, Janka Patocka, Samir Ramdani, MarthaSalimbeni, Alina Szapocznikow, Dorothea Tanning, Eden Tinto Collins,T. Venkanna
Since 2011, through invitations to other artists to participate in herown practice, Jagna Ciuchta’s work has developed and increased incomplexity. Her scalable practice, presented as group exhibitions,is a vector for affective and aesthetic relationships that are indisso- ciable 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 frame- work, Jagna Ciuchta defines her own monstration and documenta- tion tools. Her works stage the confusion between real and fanta- sised registers, internal and external spaces, the self and others ina radical form of hospitality. Using the motif of incorporating worksthat she immerses in her scenographies or photographs, JagnaCiuchta dons the invisible role of the curator—she speaks of “naivecurating”—playing with the fringes of the institutions where herwork is displayed. Her hospitality, marked by a certain eroticism, inthe sense of a desire for contact, envelopment, or even absorption,leads to a sort of self-effacement, a continual shift and unstableforms. Jagna Ciuchta’s mechanisms are constantly evolving; shecontinually reorganises the display transforming her scenography,imbued with its own rhythm, from the opening right until the end ofthe exhibition. From another perspective revealed by the strongvisual presence of the scenography, the invited artists are also con- tained within her, assimilated, or even digested by her composition.The artist’s omnipotence thus emerges, her arbitrary and emotionalchoices, her ability to create other value systems, to do things dif- ferently to a curator, while remaining fully aware of the risk of recip- rocal cannibalisation inherent to the act of welcoming or desiringthe other. Jagna Ciuchta’s oeuvre is located in the tension betweenthese two extremes.
This exhibition is coproduced with the Center of art image/imatge, Orthez,where a first chapter was on display from 11 June to 28 August 2021.