Artist: Agnieszka Kurant

Marian Goodman Gallery presents RECURSION, Agnieszka Kurant’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition brings together new and recent works—speculative thought experiments developed in collaboration with scientists, linguists, engineers, and philosophers.

Kurant’s conceptual practice investigates collective and nonhuman intelligences, the future of labor and creativity, and forms of exploitation embedded in digital capitalism. Her work examines how forms such as termite mounds, tools, languages, and social movements emerge through collective agency. In the complex systems she creates, molecules, bacteria, animals, AI algorithms, and human crowds interact to generate unstable, hybrid forms in constant transformation, like living organisms. Her projects draw on automation, cybernetics, and the processes of networked value creation in the digital economy and address the global labor extraction underlying artificial intelligence. Grown or shaped at the molecular level, her works oscillate between biological and digital, natural and artificial, life and nonlife.

The exhibition examines how digital capitalism converts human culture into a reservoir of data and renders us all part of a network of vast, recursive machines. Corporations such as Google absorb and recompute user data within feedback systems that forecast behavior; automate decisions; and preempt, monetize, and weaponize probabilistic futures. These processes in turn transform the human mind and the collective unconscious. RECURSION emphasizes how forecasting the future can actively shape it.

Kurant’s works draw on recursive and self-organizing phenomena, ranging from the biological evolution of living systems to brains, languages, social organizations, currencies, markets, and states. The artist investigates the recursive nature of digital images as “metabolic media”[1] eating the future: scraped, recomputed, and folded back into AI systems, these images extract energy, labor, and attention to train predictive algorithms in an endless feedback loop.

On the gallery’s street-level window is Future (Invention), 2024/2026, a constellation of the word future translated into fourteen languages. The work explores how different cultures spatially conceive of futurity: speakers of Aymara, Māori, Darija, Malagasy, and Yupno understand the future as coming from behind, above, or below—rather than lying ahead, as in dominant Western worldviews. The installation highlights how language shapes our thinking and invites viewers to imagine futures grounded in other cosmologies. The work references America Invention (1993) by artist Lothar Baumgarten.

At the center of the exhibition are Uncomputables (2026), an installation, and Unthoughtforms (2026), a set of suspended sculptures. Both are inspired by the experiments of British cybernetician Gordon Pask, who believed living systems can solve problems in ways that exceed human thinking. Pask developed “chemical computers”—electrochemical systems that modeled aspects of the brain and social organizations. He conceived computational problem-solving as a physical process in which solutions emerge through chemical interactions rather than abstract calculations. In his experiments, he grew metal crystals in copper sulfate solutions by passing electric currents through electrodes to form branching filaments in self-organizing feedback systems. Kurant reactivates these experiments in an aquarium where metal, tree-like forms grow in response to AI-harvested real-world socio-political and economic data, which are parsed and converted into electric current flows and sound vibrations by a computer-controlled system. Each structure records an emergent idea or solution as a physical abstract form—a crystallization of something yet unthought.

Recursivity, 2024/2026, presents a chameleon inside a terrarium whose glass panes are replaced by mirrors. Cast in bronze and coated with liquid crystals—a material used in LCD screens that fluctuates between states of matter—the sculpture draws on a riddle posed by Stewart Brand to cybernetician Gregory Bateson in 1973: What would a chameleon do when confronted with its own reflection? Here, the chameleon’s skin pigmentation is altered by a custom AI system that processes data from millions of social-media users speculating about the future and converts it into thermal and electrical signals. The work stages a perpetual mirror test, involving viewers in a recursive loop of looking and data production and reflects humanity’s entanglement in shaping, and being shaped by, its own predictions of the future.

Alien Internet, 2023/2026, features a shape-shifting cybernetic organism animated within an electromagnetic field. The work uses ferrofluid, a material developed for NASA in 1963, whose tiny magnetic particles lend it the properties of multiple states of matter. The evolving quasi-life-form is continuously reshaped by behavioral data (e.g., migrations) from millions of wild animals, including whales, bats, elephants, and sponges. This data, tracked globally through digital technologies (including AI, GPS, drones, and remote sensing), is used to predict earthquakes, pandemics, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, resulting in a planetary sensing surveillance system. Alien Internet conceives of millions of nonhuman organisms mutating into a single, sentient communication network, a collective biological computer-mind.

Adjacent Possible, 2021, explores alternative evolutionary paths of human culture by fusing Paleolithic technologies with artificial intelligence. Kurant collaborated with paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger and computational social scientist Justin Lane to train an AI algorithm on thousands of Paleolithic graphic signs that, dating from 40,000 BC to 14,000 BC, make up the earliest known forms of symbolic communication. The algorithm then generated new signs that could have emerged from the same collective subjectivity. To inscribe these signs on stone, Kurant worked with a synthetic biologist and used pigments produced by genetically engineered bacteria and fungi, an homage to the “living pigments” of the Gwion Gwion rock paintings in Australia preserved over 40,000 years by microbial activity.

Phantomatics, 2026, a looped film presented in the adjacent gallery, extends Kurant’s exploration of artificial and cross-species languages, and draws on philosophical zombies, a thought experiment that imagines beings physically identical to humans but lacking conscious experience. Developed with computational linguist Gasper Beguš, Phantomatics uses AI trained on linguistic data from thousands of languages worldwide to generate entirely new ones, each with its own distinct grammar and syntax. In the film, samples of these new languages are spoken by simulated voices and interspersed with alien-sounding vocalizations generated by training the algorithm on sounds of whales, spiders, elephants, and other animals. The uncanny result emulates a machine learning to speak, resembling the acquisition of language by children. The work’s title is a reference to Stanisław Lem’s concept of “phantomatics”—the creation of artificial realities in which self-generating languages evolve without human speakers. The synthetic entities we hear in Phantomatics have no world and none of the social relations necessary for the emergence of language and the self.

Also in the adjacent rear gallery is the series Risk Landscape, 2024, a suite of holograms depicting forecasted financial, political, and climate events in locations such as Florida, Luxembourg, Lviv, Gaza, and Doha. Developed with data scientists and catastrophe-modeling specialists, the work, which borrows its title from financial risk management, uses AI to simulate near- and long-term scenarios of measurable and immeasurable threats, including natural disasters, geopolitical conflict, financial crises, and terrorism. The project exposes how AI-based corporations monetize speculative futures—phantom abstractions detached from fact and grounded instead in statistical probability.

In Sentimentite, 2022, Kurant created a new mineral by pulverizing and mixing sixty objects that historically functioned as currencies, including Rai stones, shells, whale teeth, corn, detergent, stamps, tea, batteries, playing cards, electronic waste, soap, and cigarettes. Working with computational social scientists, the artist employed AI sentiment-analysis algorithms to harvest and aggregate emotional responses to major political, social, and ecological events from hundreds of thousands of Twitter and Reddit posts. She then used these responses to shape one hundred evolving digital fragments of this new quasi-geological formation. When redeemed, these digital NFT tokens state-change into the physical forms cast in Sentimentite. The work examines how predictions about resource value recursively shape that value.

The holographic short film Wordoid, 2026, uses experimental technology to present a collective neural state emerging from a wordless conversation between multiple minds. In collaboration with neuroscientists Adam Horowitz, Antoine Bellemare, and Philipp Tolke, Kurant used hyperscanning to record brain activity from several participants simultaneously. Brain signals from this “conversation,” related to nonverbalized mental states that range from feelings of pain and joy to sensations of a given color or smell, are processed directly by AI and mapped into latent space to generate three-dimensional forms. The algorithm learns to maximize inter-brain synchrony, creating a closed-loop neurofeedback system. Wordoid explores preverbal intelligence and speculates on future modes of communication that bypass language and vision, offering a glimpse into collective personhood, extended minds, and transformations of human consciousness.

A comprehensive monograph, Agnieszka Kurant: Collective Intelligence, was published in December 2025 by Sternberg Press. Edited by Stefanie Hessler, Jenny Jaskey, and Kurant, it includes texts by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Rosi Braidotti, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Nicolas Bourriaud, Kate Crawford, Caroline A. Jones, Nora Khan, Jussi Parikka, Matteo Pasquinelli, and Elvia Wilk, among others.

Kurant’s work is currently featured in Data Dreams: Contemporary Art in the Age of AI, at the MCA Sydney through April 27, 2026. It will also be shown in exhibitions at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and MAAT Museum, Lisbon (2026).

Her recent solo exhibitions include MUDAM, Luxembourg (2024); Kunsthal Gent (2023); Kunstverein Hannover (2023); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2022); and SculptureCenter, New York (2013). She has realized commissions for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum (2015) and for MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2021–22). Kurant’s work has also been shown at Gwangju Biennale (2024); Sydney Biennale (2024); Centre Pompidou and Pinault Collection – Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2024); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2024); Louisiana Museum, Denmark (2023); Munch Museum, Oslo (2023); Dhaka Art Summit (2023); MoMA and SFMOMA (2021); Nottingham Contemporary (2021); Kunsthalle Wien and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Istanbul Biennial and Triennale Milano (2019); Guggenheim Bilbao (2017); The Kitchen (2016); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011); and Performa Biennial, New York (2009).

Kurant was the recipient of the 2020 LACMA A+T Award and the 2019 Frontier Art Prize.