Placebo VIII

2018 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
83.82 x 115.57 x 10.16 cm.

Agnieszka Kurant

year born: 1978

nationality: Polish

Agnieszka Kurant’s Placebo VIII brings together a series of imaginary pharmaceuticals invented within the fictional narratives of literature and film. Displayed in a custom cabinet, these imaginary drugs are materialized as physical objects, packaged in meticulously designed boxes, listing dosage and description information along with references to the fictional source. Each box is filled with placebo tablets. The project is suggestive of the ways that fiction and popular culture affects how we experience reality. Placebos, or pills without active ingredients, can have powerful effects, and news scientific studies show that placebos can be used to treat some illnesses. For example, in some countries they are used by doctors to treat chronic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. Metaphorically, the work suggests the power of belief, and draws an association with the symbolic field of art. The work might also be seen as an oblique reference to and comment on the often un-critical culture of over-the-counter prescription drug-use (and abuse) in the US.

Conceptual interdisciplinary artist, Agnieszka Kurant explores 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 probes the “unknown unknowns” of knowledge and the speculations and exploits of capitalism by integrating elements of science and philosophy, and analyzing certain phenomena—collective intelligence, emergence, virtual capital, immaterial and digital labor, evolution of memes, civilizations and social movements, artificial societies, energy circuits and the editing process—as political acts. She explores the hybrid and shifting status of objects in relation to value, aura, authorship, production and circulation. Many of her works emulate nature and behave like living organisms, self-organized complex systems or bachelor machines.