We Were Tending to the Remains (IV) is the fourth and last edition of Agata Cieślak’s ongoing exhibition series developed since 2020. The artist builds space around and inside shelters representing the architecture of the uprooted. Her installation questions the concepts and material constructions of the human environment. Each of its modules illustrates theoretical categories central to the artist’s research: work, “nature”, materialism, enjoyment, beliefs, immediacy.
The aim of the process is to use the artistic practice as an emancipatory strategy in response to the lack of a new discourse on subjectivity within contemporary capitalism. The category of artistic practice appears here as an unstable value connecting all other strands of research, as well as a formal, ambivalent representation of the role of art in the processes of social production and reproduction.
Agata Cieślak (born 1990) – visual artist, author and researcher, occasionally curator. Graduate of the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem (MA Art Praxis). Later she studied philosophy at the Graduate School of Social Research in Warsaw. PhD candidate at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg since 2022. Curator and producer of the first edition of the secondaryarchive.org project – the Platform for Women Artists from Central and Eastern Europe. The practice or Agata Cieślak combines various media and means of expression, where the artistic and theoretical research are closely related. She has collaborated with several institutions in Poland and abroad, including: Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw, Lawrence Abu Hamdan Studio, Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation, Bęc Zmiana Foundation in Warsaw.