Agata Ingarden at Piktogram

Artist: Agata Ingarden

Exhibition title: Dream House

Venue: Piktogram, Warsaw, Poland

Date: September 28 – November 10, 2023

Photography: Błażej Pindor / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Piktogram, Warsaw

Dream House in Piktogram presents three bodies of work – installation Inside the Dream House, (2022-23), consisting of five sculptures Dreamer 1-5, a video-sound installation Mushroom Brain, (2022-23), made in collaboration with Wladimir Schall, and a video Dream House Program (2021), one of the three presented previously at Rescue Dummies exhibition in Kiev in 2021*. All of these works are an extension of Ingarden’s longer term research project The Dream House World – focusing on a simulation-like parallel reality invented by the artist.

Inside the Dream House and Mushroom Brain explore the lives and stories of the Butterfly People, five fictional characters central to the narrative spine of the project. To conceive them Ingarden conducted long interviews with each of the characters – participants of the experimental performances that fragments we can observe in the video Dream House Program.

Within the sound-video installation, resembling a creamy cloud, is growing a live Lion’s Mane mushroom culture, connected through sensors to the computer. The program translates the information from recorded interviews and switches between the speakers replying to the questions. The characters share in the interview their personal experience of a fictional world they were a part of (The Dream House) and speculate on the idea of what “home” is to them, considering it’s architecture or location, but mostly focusing on human relations and social structures. The collective vocal memory of the experience is subject to random force of the living organism that needs to be taken care of and watered, for their memories to survive. The result gives an impression of an intimate conversation between interviewees that resonates between the Dreamers, five free standing window structures, containing sculptures made out of handmade clothes. These fantomlike, costume figures hover behind the surface of the glass, like fairies from another world, set somewhere “between work and sleep” – as the artist mentions. “The corporate uniforms mutate, rip and reassemble into the next stage of the metamorphosis of the Butterfly People. The objects and clothing from the project live their own life transforming after being used, ready to host a new narrative.” Printed moths and inside layerings come out from the backs of jackets and trousers of the suits, suggesting wings and insect bodies. It seems that approaching the surface, the characters are in the process of materializing their own bodies from the matter found around – copper wires, fabrics and wood branches.

The windows found in suburbs of Paris, where the artist lived at the time of working on the project, represent fastly changing and developing areas of the city. The glass refers to the “false transparency” of new office and living structures populating cityscapes. Tinted glass partly frames and partly hides the figures behind. These elements, very much anchored in our reality, become a threshold or a portal to another dimension – on the other side of the mirror. Ingarden works with her sculptures like an alchemist, transforming and combining materials with the intention of giving life to her characters trapped in this contemporary landscape.

*The Dream House World starts from the exhibition “Rescue dummies” shown in Kiev in 2021 for the Future Generation Art Prize in Pinchuk Art Centre and continues in series of works: Inside The Dream House (2022), Mushroom Brain (2022) both shown at Fondation Fiminco in Paris in 2022, and 4 Rooms (2023) a video installation shown at Tono Festival for performance, dance and video art in Mexico City, in Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City.

What is the Dream House?

The Dream House is a space where I’m not concerned whether I’m inside or outside or if there is even an outside. It’s the space ultimately where you feel like once you’re inside of it, you’ve stumped. You don’t even care about that question anymore. I don’t know where it is. I think it’s comfortable. I think it’s not completely alone. The Dream House is where you’re finally there and you realise like, there’s a contentment with the fact that It doesn’t have this or that, but it’s an IT. It’s satisfying enough of the needs. Where I don’t care anymore about the urge to go out again or… I don’t know where it is, though. I still don’t know what is the Dream House. I feel like it’s not my duty to know either. If it’s a program then I’m a part of the system. If I’m a part of it, if I’m a link in the greater chain of the Dream House it’s not in my authority really to say, or I don’t dare to say that it’s in my capacity to ultimately know what it is. I think there’s just a sort of contentment of being in and it seems like it’s leading me on a metamorphic state. If it is a program, all these different rooms, elevators.. then it was all about working within the architecture in order to undergo this transformative kind of like anthropomorphic state and process. And I don’t really know to what end it is, so I can’t say that, but I don’t really need to. I just can feel it’s kind of like a faith, it is a faith based thing. – Anders

It’s probably like a floating square. Like in a virtual reality, and like the same space serves different purposes. But the shape of it is always very dry, like a simulation, almost. So there’s not really a lot of space. It’s just a lot of virtuality. But it’s like a cube. But like a cube in which you can like, upload and download… Maybe a lot of information. – Rafael

It’s like a huge space where every day you have to go and work. And it feels like… a big project where you had to go every day and loose the reality for a bit. You have to go to work to make the system, the whole system of this Dream House to function. And by your work you are feeding the whole system. But it feels like the interactions with others are helping a lot to get through it… – Masha

For me there are five spaces. Each space is four walls, a floor, a ceiling. Each space is more or less the same size. It’s not exactly the same size, but it’s still quite similar. Between these spaces, there are rhizome like connections. In each link, there is an elevator. It’s a circuit of elevators in which the elevator you take can take you where you want because everything is connected in the circuit. And in fact, the five spaces, are not at all placed in a logical way. That is to say, that taking the lift feels like such a pilgrimage that sometimes you have the impression of going up when you’re actually moving down and then actually you end up in a different place. So I imagine it’s really a maze. Whereas from outside it is a simple building. It’s like a pyramid to me, a minimalist form from the outside and inside it’s almost like the human body with organs. – Pierre-Clément

So to my vague memory, this world is somewhere between inert architecture and living architecture. There are circuits or veins to which we are connected to feed ourselves, and move around this world there. We all got together and we are connected so without having the need to speak with the mouth, we communicate rather with the body, which represents 50% of the language. It is like a society that is governed by these these circuits in fact, this thing that is alive. Well, in fact, there it not necessarily a governing structure. There are those who watch us, but we don’t know too much about them, we don’t have any interactions with them, but we know they are there. So it’s quite a unique political system. It is also like a geode. And sometimes there are dark hallways. We could reflect ourselves inside this geode, see other aspects of ourselves like in a twisted spherical mirror. To go from a place to another, one has to pass by elevators which go up, which descend, which even go in different directions. It’s always this system of ups and downs, ups and downs… Like the palpitations of a heart that experiences a shock or an appeasement. – Nico

I thought it was a place in my head. So I invited friends. And they told me they were there. So maybe its not in my head but our heads. An emotional dimension. An architecture built on 4 rooms, or maybe more, or one room, corridors, cables and elevators, that connect it all and go different directions. The circuits running on emotional fuel. The rooms make us produce and release the energy so that the system continues to function. And the music is there to pull just the right strings, and parts of the body. And sometimes if I touch my hand maybe its not mine but someone else’s and it seems like there is no difference. You fuse and detach and its painful. There is no way in our out, we are just there – dreaming, and the Dream House exists because we keep dreaming the dream someone else has put in our heads. – Agata

Agata Ingarden, Dream House, 2023, exhibition view, Piktogram, Warsaw

Agata Ingarden, Inside the Dream House (Dreamer 1), 2022-2023, solar control glass, steel construction, silk screen printed textiles, copper wire, wood, screws, silicon, 245 × 70 × 105 cm

Agata Ingarden, Inside the Dream House (Dreamer 2), 2022-2023, solar control glass, steel construction, silk screen printed textiles, copper wire, wood, screws, tape, 245 × 75 × 115 cm

Agata Ingarden, Inside the Dream House (Dreamer 3), 2022-2023, solar control glass, steel construction, silk screen printed textiles, copper wire, wood, screws, silicon, 245 × 87 × 115 cm

Agata Ingarden, Inside the Dream House (Dreamer 4), 2022-2023, solar control glass, steel construction, silk screen printed textiles, copper wire, screws, 295 × 70 × 105 cm

Agata Ingarden, Inside the Dream House (Dreamer 5), 2022-2023, solar control glass, steel construction, silk screen printed textiles, copper wire, wood, screws, 249 × 102 × 108 cm

Agata Ingarden, Mushroom Brain, 2022-2023, solar control glass, steel construction, copper wire, wood, screws, mushroom video-sound installation: Mac Mini computer, custom made sensor, Audient EVO 8 Soundcard, TS – RCA cables x 5, Lion’s Mane inoculated growing bags, passive speakers x 5, monitor, 246 × 67 × 105 cm