Apocalypse Now
2018
Colored resin, glass globe, glitter
4.5 x 4.0 x 4.0 inches
Edition of 10 + 3AP

Apocalypse Now subversively and playfully addresses human caused climate change and seeks to dynamically describe its long term impacts while blurring the boundary between nature and culture. The piece makes a reference to Kurant’s earlier work, Political Weather (2007), which was inspired by the act of attempting to influence the weather. This practice was once common in the USSR through the use of cloud busters to ensure sunshine for the communist parades, and has also been practiced more recently in contemporary China, when the Olympic Games Committee sought to clear the sky over Beijing from pollution, resulting in artificial rains and snowfall which was often black in color. In 2010, this piece acquired additional and almost prophetic meaning when the volcanic cloud over Iceland caused the world economy a $5 billion loss – an example of the influence of the weather on economy and politics, and of the agency of nature.

Currently the discussions around the climate change in the Anthropocene prompted Kurant to revisit this form and idea and create a portable “conversation piece” version of this problem. Apocalypse Now is a snow globe for the times of climate change.

The snow inside the globe is replaced by black snow – or ash. When snowing, it gradually covers the outline of the cityscape / datascape / geological formation that resembles the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. The Giant’s Causeway is a rare example of a geological formation based on emergence where, in an extremely rare event, lava froze into regular basalt columns that resemble a cityscape, a data scape, or the virtual landscape of the video game Minecraft.

Apocalypse Now also references the Black Swan theory, developed by complexity scientists. It holds that crucial changes in complex systems (social, economic, ecological, etc.) occur through sudden and unexpected Extremely Rare Events that, by de nition, cannot be repeated. For this reason, this concept postulates moving away from science’s current prevailing emphasis on the study of average and mean values, and instead including all kinds of unique, unpredictable, and seemingly insignificant pieces of noise, outliers, errors, and extremely rare events. This theory was developed to explain the disproportionate role of high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events of large magnitude that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, and technology, and the psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty.

Agnieszka Kurant (born 1978 in Lodz, Poland) is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist who examines how complex social, economic and cultural systems can operate in ways that confuse distinctions between fiction and reality or nature and culture. She investigates “the economy of the invisible,” in which immaterial and imaginary entities, fictions, phantoms and emergent processes influence political and economic systems.

Kurant’s recent exhibitions include a solo show at SCAD MoA in Savannah and at the CCA in Tel Aviv (2017), commissions for Guggenheim Bilbao, for La Panacee, Montpelier, for SFMOMA Open Space (2018) and for Bonner Kunstverein (2017). In 2015 she did a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2013-2014, she presented a major solo exhibition at the Sculpture Center, New York. Her work has been also exhibited at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013), Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011), Moderna Museet (2014), MUMOK, Vienna (2009), Tate Modern, London (2006), The Kitchen, New York (2016), Grazer Kunstverein (2015), Stroom Den Haag (2014) and Performa Biennial, New York (2013). In 2010 she co-represented Poland at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (with Aleksandra Wasilkowska). In 2008 she did a commission for Frieze Projects in London.

Kurant is currently an artist in residence at MIT Center for Art Science and Technology in Boston and a Smithsonian Institute fellow. Her work has been reviewed in major publications such as The New York Times, Frieze, Artforum, Mousse, Art in America. She is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, where she lives and works, and by Fortes d’Aloia and Gabriel Gallery in Sao Paulo and Rio.