Agnieszka Kurant, Collective Intelligence

The SCAD Museum of Art presents "Collective Intelligence," a solo exhibition featuring the work of Agnieszka Kurant, composed of sculpture, works on paper, lenticular prints and a video. Kurant’s research-based practice explores how complex social, economic and cultural systems can operate in ways that confuse distinctions between fiction and reality or nature and culture. Through unconventional artistic media and methods of manifestation, the artist investigates the concealed exploitations of social energies in contemporary economy and cultural production.

In a world in which information is nearly free, social capital is starting to play a far more significant role than financial capital. Today, we no longer know when our labor and social capital are being stealthily harvested through algorithmic data analysis, gentrification processes or complex financial instruments. Kurant probes the speculations and exploits of capitalism by analyzing phenomena such as collective intelligence, emergence, virtual capital, immaterial and digital labor and the evolution of memes, civilizations and social movements. She explores the hybrid and shifting status of objects in relation to value, aura, authorship, production, copyright and circulation.

Together, these works dismantle notions of artistic autonomy through multifarious approaches to collaboration, outsourcing and appropriation, while revealing the complex social and economic systems in which we are complicit.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website