Jagna Ciuchta

Adjunct Faculty

Visual artist, born in Poland, Jagna lives and works in Paris.

Education
After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań (Poland) in 2001, she completed her Practice Based PhD within the ENS/PSL University doctoral program at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, entitled Expositions : je dilaté, images liquides et plantes carnivores (Exhibitions: Expanded I, Liquid Images and Carnivorous Plants) in 2019.

Teaching
École Nationale Supérieure d’Art Villa Arson, Nice
École Municipale des Beaux Arts, Galerie Édouard Manet, Gennevilliers

Experience
Jagna Ciuchta’s invitations to other artists make up a practice in itself that she has been developing since 2010. Taking the form of collective exhibitions, her work offers a vehicle for affective and aesthetic connections while she questions her own relation to institutions and to the environment in which she operates. Her propositions stage the confusion between reality and fantasy, interior and exterior spaces, the self and otherness, through a form of radical hospitality. Incorporating works into her own scenographies, Jagna Ciuchta disappears behind the figure of the curator (she talks about “naive curating”), playing with the margins of the inviting institution. Her hospitality, laden with a degree of eroticism, instigates a kind of self-erasure, a sense of continuous shifts and formal instability. Indeed, she constantly modifies her apparatuses, rearranging the works on display and radically remodels her scenography, which follows its own pace from beginning to end. From another point of view, however, as evidenced by the strong physical presence of her configuration, her guest artists are contained within and assimilated into—if not digested by—her composition. There, emerges all the power of the artist, who is freer than any curator to make arbitrary choices, to recreate other systems of values, to act differently, fully aware of the reciprocal threats of cannibalization intrinsic to inviting or desiring the other. Jagna Ciuchta’s work exists in the tension between these two polarities.