Agata Ingarden’s first comprehensive exhibition in Switzerland, Desire Path, creates imaginary worlds beyond anthropocentric perspectives and combines organic forms with cultural and industrial reference systems.
Agata Ingarden develops scenarios of speculative futures in her works and opens up new spaces for imagination and experience. Her visual vocabulary surprises with unexpected connections between everyday objects and natural materials, industrial processes and organic forms. In this field of tension, the works appear both alien and familiar. They play with human and non-human scales and are reminiscent of past cultures and techniques. Ingarden works across media, from installations and sculptures to video works.
The exhibition unfolds a multi-layered scenario in which each floor represents not only a spatial but also a conceptual transition. A dramaturgical movement unfolds over three galleries: from the landscape as an open, processual world, to the house as a living organism, to the inner self, which oscillates between protection and control. Ingarden’s works are not self-contained narratives but experimental arrangements. They function as laboratories for possible futures – scenarios that are tested through shifts in perspective, through material in transformation, through bodies in dissolution and regeneration.
The World
On the ground floor, the world becomes visible in the form of an entropic landscape that addresses the constant transformation of matter and the openness of new universes. Central to this is the installation Like Mushrooms after Rain (2019), in which the image of the mushroom – a symbol of rhizomes, networks and unpredictable growth – provides a metaphor for organic futures. Copper mirror objects, oxidised with salts and chemicals, function both as windows into other universes and as mental maps. By multiplying the central sculpture and scattering it into infinity, they make it possible to experience that these imaginary worlds cannot be fixed. They remain fluid, reactive and are constantly in the process of becoming – like the matter itself, which Ingarden sets in motion.
The Home
The middle floor is dedicated to domestic space – a place of belonging and protection, but also of projection of inner processes. In the series Hours of Dog (2020–2025), sculptural forms emerge, condensing into cloud-like structures made of oyster shells or fragments of buildings. Neon light glows from within, illuminating the small model windows and making the works appear like miniatures of architectural dreamscapes. This combination creates the impression of being in an intermediate realm that seems both organic and artificial, familiar and alien. With the title, Ingarden suggests a poetic shift by metaphorically alluding to the transition period between day and night. That moment of twilight when the familiar (day, dog) and the unfamiliar (night, wolf) / Kunsthalle Appenzell coexist. Together with the videos The Arm, The Eyes, The Ears, The Womb, The House and The Garden (2018), an image of the house as a living organism is created. Architecture is not represented as a static structure but as a body with organs, moved by messages, objects and personal stories. The home becomes a permeable membrane between the inner psyche and the outside world – a threshold that shows how deeply the private sphere is interwoven with social, media and technological structures.
The Self
On the top floor, the exhibition leads into the interior – into a room that is both a surveillance centre and a space for reflection. With the works Social Security (Grandma’s Cupboard) and Social Security (Bathroom Fridge) (both 2022), Ingarden explores the intertwining of intimacy, security and control. The subtitles refer to pieces of furniture that are familiar places in everyday domestic life and here become vehicles for questions of protection, care and social dependencies. A wall of monitors, fed with camera transmissions from inside the sculpture and real-time images from the building’s security cameras, transforms the room into a hybrid control centre. By exposing the glass ceiling and playing with reflections, a situation is created that stages both transparency and surveillance, thus making it possible to experience the fragility of security in the tension between privacy and control.
Bio
Agata Ingarden (born 1994, Poland) lives and works between Paris and Athens. Her works have been shown in solo exhibitions such as Elations, Gdańsk City Gallery, Gdańsk, Poland (2025); EmoPolis, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Łódź, Poland (2024); Emotional Security Services, Berthold Pott Gallery, Cologne, Germany (2023); Dream House, Warsaw Gallery Weekend, Piktogram, Warsaw, Poland (2023), and in group exhibitions such as Swarożyce, The Centre of Polish Sculpture, Orońsko, Poland (2025); Gwangju Biennale, PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century, Gwangju, KR (2024); Stranger Things, Neue Galerie Gladbeck, Gladbeck, DE (2024); Sybil, Brussels, BE (2024); This Perfect Day, Exo Exo, Paris, FR (2023); Barbe à Papa, CAPC museum for contemporary art, Bordeaux, FR (2022); Never the Same Ocean, Hagiwara Projects x Soda, Tokyo, JP (2021); Alles war klar, Künstlerhaus, Vienna, AT (2020); Warm Welcome, Exo Exo, Paris, FR (with Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos) (2020); Future in Reverse, East Contemporary, Milan, IT (with Agnieszka Polska) (2020); Futur, Ancien, Fugitif, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR (2019); Foncteur d’oubli, Frac Ile-de-France / Le Plateau, Paris, FR (2019); Boom selection, La Panacée, MO.CO., Montpellier, FR (2019); Five Fingers, Sixth Hand, Alienze, Lausanne, CH (with Delphine Mouly) (2019). She received the Special Prize at the Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, UA (2021). She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Cooper Union School of Art, New York, US.
