Listen to podcast: Interview with Mary Jane Jacob. Magdalena Abakanowicz at Tate Modern

For this episode, one of our art writers Patrycja Rozwora traveled to London to attend the press view of Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope at Tate Modern. After joining the curators tour conducted by Ann Coxon (Curator, International Art at Tate Modern) and Mary Jane Jacob (external, independent curator), we managed to set up an interview with Jacob’s to create a podcast about the exhibition. Our conversation with Jacob – a North American curator, writer, and educator from Chicago, Illinois provides meaningful insight regarding the legacy of Magdalena Abakanowicz. 

Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017) was an extraordinary Polish artist known among many for her large fiber sculptures called the Abakans. Her use of organic materials broke new ground for artistic movements in the 1960s and 70s. Bringing together 26 of these radical works for the first time in the UK, the exhibition at Tate Modern presents a forest of towering sculptures, enabling visitors to explore their ambiguous forms in a refreshing and innovative museum installation.

During the podcast, we shed some light onto Abakanowicz’s working processes, her inspirations and motivations to create her iconic textile sculptures – to unearth creatures living somewhere between the figurative and the abstract. Mary Janes Jacob discovered the work of Abakanowicz right at the start of her own career in the later 70s. Having a general fascination with public, site-specific, and socially engaged art, Jacob was the first to bring Abakanowicz’s work to North America. She curated the largest retrospective of her work to ever have been done, shown across the US and Canada, which was organised by the Museum of Contemporary art in Chicago. 

The story about the decades-long collaboration between the artist and the curator gives us a unique and personal portrait of Magdalena Abakanowicz: a Polish woman, artist, sculptor, writer and thinker whose timeless works can tell so much about our current relationship with the environment and the world around us. 

This podcast episode was created together with the Polish Cultural Institute London and Kitchen Conversations. 

Listen to the podcast on:

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Kitchen Conversations – podcast about contemporary art from so-called ‘Eastern Europe’ is produced by artist Patrycja Rozwora (since May 2020).