Alicja Kwade on the Absurdity of Being Alive

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Alicja. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

ALICJA KWANDE: Thank you so much. Nice being here.

SB: I thought we’d just get into it with the fact that your sculptures and installations largely focus on time. [Laughs] You’re maybe the most on-point artist I’ve ever had on the show because, of course, all art on some level deals with time, but yours explicitly does, in many different ways, which we’ll dig in to. Also, you’re really interested in and focused on the subjectivity of time and space, so let’s start there. Let’s start in the metaphysical. You once said, “It’s only by chance that we are here in this moment.”

AK: Oh, absolutely. It’s a beautiful chance, but it is. No, I have a very difficult relationship with the topic of time. I personally don’t even like it very much, and I try to push it back for me, for myself. Of course, it’s not possible, and I’m just digging in deeper and deeper somehow. First of all, why I was trying to avoid it, but I can’t avoid it, so it’s like a perpetual mobile somehow. But it’s such an emotional topic. It’s such an overvalued topic, a little bit, and it is leading easily to kitsch somehow. This is because it’s so important to us, because we are so important to ourselves. It’s a very egocentric point of view.

SB: Yeah, you’ve called it “romantic,” too.

AK: Romantic, egocentric, right? [Laughter] Yeah. But of course it is, because it is the only natural force, even if it’s not a real natural force, that is shaping us and doing something to us, and that’s why we take it as something so important. That’s why it’s also not letting me go, somehow. [Laughter]

SB: Lean into this irony fact of it a little bit—because I think, at least human time, which is to say clock time, the invention of the clock—really is this sort of… Our sense of reality is warped, shaped, morphed, controlled by the clock in some ways. I think your work has been investigating that. I’d love to hear you just talk about the irony of this, that we go about our days in the ways that we do, many of us not thinking so deeply about that. It’s just, “Oh, time is what it is.”

AK: Yeah, it is. I think we are very ironic creatures anyway, right? I mean, a human being, for me, it’s pure irony actually. [Laughter]  At the end of the day, you can just try to treat it a bit humoristically. What I’m trying to do is actually to look kind of a little bit behind those structures, which we take for certain, which we just accept, and which we agree on each morning. Whenever your clock is ringing, you agree with it, right? It’s like an agreement. You could also say, “Oh, no, it’s not 8 a.m., I don’t agree with it. It’s probably just 7:30,” or “It’s 12,” or whatever. But we set these kind of systems to make it work, because we’re many little homo sapiens on this planet, and at some point, we had to match our time, to make trains connect, to have markets together, to talk to each other.

We need these kind of grids of systems, different systems—time is one, but a very important one—to just make it work, to create something like society, like systems. For me, it’s like a pure agreement, of course, because as you already said, we are much more woven in this construct of time, space, us as a physical happening in space and time—a quite short happening in space and time, a co-accidental happening in space and time. Whenever I think about it, even that I’m talking to you now, this is like, what is it, one to a trillion, or even more? This chance that this is happening, it’s very rare actually, if you think in a bigger dimension. Even if it appears like a small world, but it just appears as a small world because we are always just in this little straw of the present and we don’t see the whole thing.

SB: Do you think your work on some level is… of course, it’s framing time, but do you think you’re physical-izing our understanding of time? Obviously, you use a clock, we’ll get to the clock part, but I’m thinking more of some of your sculptural pieces, where you create a framework, an armature, a structure, and that structure sort of disappears, but it’s framing the thing. It probably sounds very abstract to the listeners, what I’m saying, but—

AK: Of course it’s abstract, because it’s abstract itself somehow, so I’m not trying to illustrate too much. Somehow, yes. I mean, also how I technically try to do it, is that I try to think about physical objects as those time-influenced things, which are somehow floating in this universe, and then I try somehow to disconnect them to their natural behavior somehow, or what we expect them to be. Then I try to have a lead with physical forces which are given somehow, and to implant a narration in it, which is the time aspect, actually. It’s like the fourth dimension in sculpture a little bit, and then it makes it do something, even if it’s not, of course, because it’s a steady sculpture, right? It’s kind of trying to include those things.

SB: Yeah. Well, there’s this optical illusion element, too. Do you view time as an illusion? Is that—

AK: Oh, absolutely. It is an illusion, absolutely. I think we all know that, it’s just so hard to believe it’s an illusion because we are seeing ourselves being very much influenced by it. So It’s not an illusion, I think, truly not, but it is so hard to understand for us, so we create these very simple pictures for it, to give it a face, and to make it easier for us to process it. But we cannot get it at all, and that’s why, again, it somehow transfers to an illusion, because we create the illusion of it, which is not like it at all, but this is somehow needed. It’s the most abstract thing we have. This is the most abstract thing we can even think of, and we cannot think of, because our brains are very limited. So yes, it kind of leads, or it just keeps, the illusion in the end somehow.

What I try to do quite a lot, and you’re right, and also succinct with what I am doing. I use quite a lot of mirrors to do this illusions. Because what I do quite a lot, is that I use the mirror to kind of double the reality picture somehow. I try not to make it create a new picture, but I try to use it to double what is there, and somehow to double reality in a way. If you see the mirror picture, which is overlapping the real picture, but it’s the same picture, you’re becoming very uncertain about what is real, what is not real, and where you are and where you’re not, and what your position is.

When I use objects, what I also do quite a lot today, is that the objects themselves are the mirror pictures of themselves. Again, I’m somehow taking away the action of the mirror by letting the objects being the mirror objects, and this is creating this illusion somehow, which makes space kind of unexpected, woven between surreal and unreal, if you want to call it. It’s probably not the right term to call it “real” or “unreal,” because unreal is not more unreal than the real idea. [Laughs] But I think you know what I mean. [Laughter]

SB: I hope we’re not totally confusing the listeners, but—

AK: I’m sure we do.

SB: Let’s dig into your new exhibition that’s about to open at Pace in New York, called “Telos Tales.” This will expand this long-standing interest you’ve had in time as a structuring device, or principle, in how we perceive reality, causality, things like that. Could you speak to these works and how they embody the elusive nature of time, the cyclical nature of time?

AK: It will appear as one big installation, but indeed, it’s six singular works. We have those three bigger clock works, and three bigger, let’s call it “tree-frame” sculptures. Still, for me, it’s like one thing, because it’s a whole exhibition of course. The title—this is probably telling a little bit—it’s about this telos, which telos always is a way in the future of something which has the future in it already. For example, like a grain which is having the telos to get a tree. It is already there, even if the future is not yet there yet. It is somehow combining this aspect of time, very much, what it is, what presence is, what future and past is, and where we are, and what that is. I very much also mean it for the human telos, what the human telos is. The human telos could be, as Aristotle was seeing it, to be fulfilled and lucky, whatever that means, or to create something. It includes this kind of moving future in a present object of this being.

This is covering the whole exhibition, actually. So we have these frames, which somehow turn to trees, or the other way, which are pretending to be art, because we are showing in a gallery—I’m an artist, so it must be art. [Laughter] It’s something which is kind of between nature, architecture, human creation, and the trans-fluid something in between it. It is like what is meant to be what, and it’s kind of not clear what is influencing what and where the lead is somehow. This is kind of combined with those three suspending objects, which are big stainless-steel tubes polished from the in and outside. They’re including street clocks, actually clocks which are usually meant to be outdoors to show the time, and what happens of course, due to the reflection, those faces of those clocks, which are kind of the faces of the system which we created, is getting very much stretched and kind of squeezed. It also changes the sound when you get close to it. 

For me, this very much stands for—what I was trying to explain—this straw we are in. Because we never see—we are always in the present, so we can never get the past or the future. We are in this straw with two cut ends, so we are jumping in, on the one hand, when we are born, and then we are falling out on the other side somehow. In between, we have the straw, which is long or short, depending. [Laughs]

SB: Life as a straw. [Laughs]

AK: Life is somehow—you’re in the straw. You can just see it from the first kind of entrance, and then from the other side, but you don’t see what is out there.

SB: I’m trying to remember what Hiroshi Sugimoto said on the podcast when I interviewed him, about a year ago. He said something almost exactly like this—he didn’t use the straw, but he basically said, “You’re born, and then you die, and life is what happens in between.” [Laughs] [Editor’s note: Sugimoto said, “We came from somewhere and we disappear to somewhere, and life is in between.”]

AK: Absolutely. That’s right. Could not say it better. I think it’s so funny sometimes. A human being is such an ironic thing because we take ourselves for so important, and we think we’ve kind of got it, or got anything. I don’t think we’ve got any little thing, because it’s just such a co-accidental, short period of time, and we are just able to feel and to experience what we are in right now. We can never see the full picture of time. It’s completely impossible. It’s just this little, little path we are in. We think we know about a week. Even things that we can feel time somehow, and our presence, but I’m not even very sure about that. I mean, it’s kind of an illusion, I think, our brain has to create, otherwise you would not… For example, if you would not know that the sun would get up the next day again, if you would not think it, you’d just believe it, you would not even be able to see anything, so you would not be able to… But even if you would not see it, but you know it, you believe it. So we believe—

SB: Yeah, you know the sun is true. [Laughs]

AK: So you believe in this concept, this kind of imaginary, which is kind of broken out there, which is somehow this big kind of “bubble” of time, and in this belief of it, we are kind of able to function somehow.

SB: You have so many works that get at the different natures of time, I should say. One I wanted to bring up was “Light Lessons (January/Berlin),” from earlier this year, which are these brass watch hands on cardboard. It’s really about, you could say, the cyclical nature of time. Could you talk about that particular work?

AK: It’s about the amount of light hours per day in months, on average. It’s quite exact, because you can just research that. For example, in January, we have more dark hours, and we have the in-between hours, and then we have less sun hours, and then this is expanding during the year, so we have more light hours than night hours. Still, what I was trying to do, what I’m always trying to do, is these clock hands, and I’m working with those clock hands since over ten years now.

I mean, what is the system like? Nobody’s using those kind of watches any longer, I think. We still, I think, have this idea of this clock, with this clock face, a twelve on the top, a six down there, three, nine, and then these little clock hands, which are kind of moving around. This is, I think, most people’s idea of time or a clock. If you take it apart somehow, so you don’t look at it… If you would look at it as something which is constantly moving, which time is, it kind of creates a different pattern, it becomes something very different. For funny reasons, it even creates something like a light wave if you follow it, which is in the system—I have not invented it, I’ve just been unfolding it somehow. 

Then I was trying to combine it with this kind of natural event of the sun, of course, for just raising and getting down again each day, and somehow trying to combine this invented system and numbers with the natural event. Also, our emotions towards it as living creatures, which are very much dependent on the sun. Because we need it, we love it, we need it. We could not live without that. So I’m trying to combine those events and those pieces.

SB: You mentioned you’ve been working with these clock hands for more than a decade. Tell me about the evolution of that. When did you decide to start working with them, and what was the sort of impetus there?

AK: I was really obsessed with researching what this time thing is, how it can be described, how it was described, who was deciding what about it, and when. When you dig deep in it, it also becomes very political. It’s not just by accident that, for example, as the clock goes from left to right, because it’s about the Northern Hemisphere. It’s like many things, so I was really obsessed to discover all the—

SB: Or that we have time zones, right?

AK: Time zones, yeah, It’s just pure politics. 

I was really obsessed to figure out why and who and when, and so on. I discovered all these things about it, and I was reading about all the theories about time dilation, all this kind of, from Einstein to whatever. I was trying to get a picture and to kind of explain it to myself. Then I was also buying clocks on eBay, and I was collecting everything, which was kind of connected to that, and I was obsessed for a time, also, to buy exactly the same kind of clock on eBay, but from all over the world. I don’t know why I even did it.

SB: [Laughs]

AK: Then by chance, I bought the complete, how do you call it in English? I forgot. A clockmaker’s leftovers. He had to shut down his shop, so it was inventory.

SB: All the parts, yeah.

AK: Yeah, all the parts, so his inventory. I got thousands of clock hands, beautiful clock hands from all these countries. Then I had just been throwing them on the cardboard, and was kind of playing around with them, and then I was trying to build a system out of that somehow. I started to glue them in an order. What I always try to do, is that I try to find rules in the work for myself, which I’m never leaving. Which is kind of weird, because those rules are not really logical sometimes. For example, the rule was that a gap between the clock hands is always the same length as the clock hand itself, and that it moves, it starts on midnight, and then it goes to one, and two, and three, and stuff like that. Then I was just trying things, like, “Okay, how much time can I fill in a format?” or “Can I measure with that?” 

The first works I did of that kind, was that I would measure a space with those clock hands and time. I would glue the first clock hand in the first corner of the space when I enter, exhibition space, and then I would, again, have this rule: The distance is always the same size as the clock hand itself. Then I move forward, midnight, one, two, three, da, da, da, and then in the end, when I finished my gluing, I can say the room is two hundred fifty-one days and eight hours. This is as true as it would be fifty-one meters, or something. It’s like a specific system I was inventing, to measure it in a different way. This is how it started. 

Then it got kind of further that also I’ve been trying to play with this idea… I was kind of trying the amount of time to create a needed format, so I was saying, “Okay, I want to map out one year of time with those clock hands.” Each clock hand stands for one hour, and then I see how big this is going to get, depending on the clock hands and stuff. So it got quite big, but still doable, about three meters fifty, I think, wide, and two high, or something. I don’t know in inches. No, but slightly smaller then. Then it got further, and then I was thinking that’s kind of also fun to sell a year. It’s something you cannot buy at all, but then I’m kind of offering it. It’s for sale.

SB: It reminds me of On Kawara with those “Date Paintings,” right?

AK: Yes, it did.

SB: Just a day.

AK: Yes, of course. I love On Kawara, of course. I’m very influenced by that as well.

So it was about measure and time and value and art market and swapping systems, transferring systems, and mapping them.

SB: You’ve called time “probably the most personal force surrounding our lives”—you pretty much touched on that earlier, too, with how well you waxed on time. You’ve been incorporating clocks, so beyond just the clock parts, and, in some sense, making what I would say is “clock-based artworks,” since 2012. Among your earliest clocks was “Gegen den Lauf.” Could you talk about this work, and how and when you decided to begin making art out of clocks? [Laughs]

AK: It’s a good question. I don’t know when I decided. I think it’s for most artists like that, it’s not like a decision maybe, you know? It starts with things that you don’t decide to be an artist, it’s also not like you don’t finish school with like, love or art? I think it’s the same with art pieces.

SB: Clock or art?

AK: Yeah, clock or whatever, a brush. [Laughter] It kind of came to me automatically. As I was telling before, I’ve kind of just been trying to understand it. I was hardly trying to understand it. Even if I was a teenager, I would do drawings and numbers, and stuff like that. I was trying to get it, but I couldn’t. I was kind of continuing to try to get it, and then look at it in different ways with physical objects, as you said. Because for me, the clock is not just this poetic thing, which is a clock face and the time, which is kind of running off, blah, blah. But it’s also a system: the beat of it, the numbers behind it, what it counts, and how long it counts, and when it starts, when it ends. Then I figured out this connection between our heartbeat and this beat, and it all started to make sense somehow. 

But also, I love these objects, which are made with this precision, and which have been made by hands, by people. Also, I got obsessed with the idea that the clock, as an object itself, has a certain time, and stands for a certain time, and you can see a certain time in it. Because you can recognize from which time it is, it’s kind of stuck in its own time, even if it’s counting time the whole day long.

I started to buy those antique clocks. I’ve been collecting pocket clocks forever, and I’ve been collecting all kinds of stuff. I didn’t even know what I want to do with that, but I was collecting all the things, and then taking them apart. I was also trying to do sound pieces out of that. It probably was quite fluid, but I think it started very much when I started my studies, or something. I mean, more seriously, before it was more co-accidentally. 

I think my first video pieces—I did video pieces in the very beginning, from 1999 or something, it’s appearing, so there’s this kind of clock appearing on the videos.

SB: So it was sort of an inevitable thing, it didn’t just happen in 2012, it was a—

AK: No, no, no, it was very much there all the time. Even in the beginning, probably less on purpose, more co-accidentally, because in the beginning, I think you’re just more looking for any kind of different directions you want to go.

SB: You’re finding a language.

AK: Yeah, you’re trying to find a language. Looking back, it’s almost strange to see that it’s very much still what I do now. It has not changed really. The format, yes; the size, yes. Of course, it’s just simply, no, I can’t afford to pay production costs, and stuff, which I couldn’t in the beginning, of course. This has changed, but not the topics very much.

SB: “Stellar Day,” from 2013, I wanted to mention, because it’s not explicitly a clock, but it’s this large stone that rotates via motor and a cable underneath it, so I view it as a sort of clock. Do you see it that way?

AK: Oh, yeah, you can see it as a clock. But it is actually turning at the same speed as the globe. It’s not exactly twenty-four hours, it’s twenty-three point five six, or something. It also depends where it is. I can adjust it, you will never see it—it makes no sense actually, because nobody sees it. I can adjust it to wherever it is on the planet. Because the closer it comes to the equator, the more precise it gets, and kind of shorter the days. It does move the opposite direction of the planet in the same speed where it is, so it has a very precise amount of time of the rotation of the planet. What I really like about it—and I love the piece myself—because it’s so quiet, nobody will find—

SB: No, I mean, just for the listeners, and we’ll put a photo of it on our Time Sensitive website, but it’s this massive stone that you wouldn’t think would rotate. [Laughs]

AK: No, you can just basically see it when you leave the space for a while, and then you come back, and you would see that it changed position. Which also is funny somehow. [Laughter] It’s irritating because some people think, “Oh, have they moved it or have I looked wrong in it, or something?” But it’s just very slowly rotating. What I love about it is this idea that seeing from this point, from the middle point of the stone, it’s the only thing which is standing still, because it rotates to the opposite side.

SB: So the motor is directly underneath it, right?

AK: Yes. It’s actually one of those motors they use for car presentations.

SB: Oh, that rotate the car? [Laughter]

AK: Yes. There’s like a little hole and it’s implanted there. [Laughter]

SB: If we’re talking about time and your use of clocks, I have to bring up “Against the Run,” from 2015. It’s this Sisyphean time sculpture [laughs] that you presented on the southeast corner of Central Park, with Public Art Fund. It also now has been installed permanently in a couple of places: M.I.T.’s campus, and also at the Pinacoteca Agnelli Art Center in Italy, which, I feel like the Agnelli Art Center, that’s a very appropriate place to put this piece. Maybe first, just tell the listeners about this work and what you were hoping viewers come away with after spending time with it.

AK: For me, it’s like a kind of, I’ll say, humoristic but dramatic piece, in a way. So what it does, actually, the clock functions like it does, right? So the arm of the second is turning to the right, a minute, an hour, so you could read the time if you would kind of follow it the right way. Most people don’t believe it, but it’s true, because it looks like the… It’s kind of alarming—it looks like the hand of the second is always at midnight. But actually, what it does, that every time the arm of the second turns to the right, the whole clock face turns to the left. So it kind of tries to escape itself, but it can’t. It’s a bit like Sisyphus, trying to push up the stone, but it never, never… Really, it’s always pushed down again. It’s just like a reverse movement. It’s kind of escaping its own system, let’s say. You can still read the time, but—because it’s still showing the right time, because it’s all summing up. 

It was very funny when I had it in Central Park the first time, because I’ve been choosing like a very typical New York street clock. It was produced with a company which is based close to Boston, and they do nothing else since ages than to build clocks for all the cities in the U.S. I asked them to help me to make this work true, and they had to invent this mechanism, which is with the sensors. There’s quite a lot of computer work behind it, but you cannot see it. Every time the sensor sees the clock hand moving to the right, the whole clock face is moving to the left.

It was quite funny in Central Park. I’ve been there, and I was just sitting on a bench and looking at people, and you had all these people, like, all the joggers and people with dogs. They would stop and check the phones, and be like, “Okay, something is strange,” right? [Laughs] It’s about how we see it, how we perceive it, but it’s also just funny and irritating. I’ve also been observing it at M.I.T. campus, and I had one situation, it was really funny, I was just sitting there as well, and it was a woman coming out. She was rushing from one door to the other door, because it’s in between two departments. She stopped, and she looked at it, and she started to laugh loud, like crazy. I was like, “Okay, perfect.” [Laughter]

It’s about this human irony somehow, we are all trying to escape time—escape and escape and escape—but there’s no way. We are trying to be healthy, to exercise, do all kinds of things to escape it, but there’s no way out. [Laughter]

SB: There’s one more work I wanted to mention on the time tip, although I would say all your work, on some level, deals with time, explicitly or not, but this one is “88 Seconds,” from 2017. It’s a sort of slinky-like stainless-steel sculpture unfolding over itself. It’s making time visible in a way, subtly also alluding to the work of Eadweard Muybridge. Could you speak to this link between Muybridge’s studies of motion and this sculpture? Because, to me, that’s interesting from a time perspective, for more reasons than one. There’s obviously the link across time, between your work and his, but also the notion of making time visible.

AK: It’s absolutely right. I mean, I’ve been studying Muybridge very intensely because I loved this kind of idea, what he was trying to do. But it wasn’t like a one-to-one influence. I knew about it, and then probably I forgot about it again. What I’m trying to do quite a lot, and what I was trying to explain in the beginning, is that I’m trying to include this time aspect into steady sculpture, which is quite easy to make with our brains, because whenever we just see three objects from a certain distance, we believe there is movement. We have to believe that because, otherwise, we could not survive. So if you see a big object coming closer, “Oh, I better escape.” We can read this motion, and very easily, this can be translated the other way. So you see something which is not moving, but you see different, certain gaps between an object, which are getting longer or shorter, and so you believe there is motion in it.

This is something I’m kind of always trying to implant—not always, but quite a lot. Those studies, like “88 Seconds,” I was really trying to study it very precisely, and to make an object as much alive in its time span of emotion as possible. How I did it, there was a lot of effort you cannot see in the sculpture at all. I was mapping the whole floor, like in a little raster. Then I had five cameras, four on the floor, one from the ceiling, and then I would spin this ring. It’s just like a stainless-steel ring. So I spin it, I gave it a spin, I’ve been filming it until it was again like calm, lying on the floor. Then I had that on the computer, and I could cut it in little pieces, like Muybridge, right? I was like doing the Muybridge at the computer in a film-cutting program, and then because we had the map, I could exactly tell where this object has been in which second of its movement. This movement was eighty-eight seconds. So this is the whole story behind it. [Laughter] Then the poor metal guy had to exactly weld it together as I was giving it to him in a 3-D map and model.

SB: Basically it’s a film becoming sculpture.

AK: Yes. The film is not important actually, it’s really just a helping tool, but it’s more an action of an object as an object itself, somehow. So the action, the time, if you want—the time span—becomes the object.

SB: You’re freezing time in a way.

AK: I’m not freezing it, actually, because I’m giving it all the… It’s not one moment. It’s all the moments.

SB: It’s all the moments.

AK: It’s all moments of one action in time, which would be lovely to give to other whatevers. This could be used on anything, almost, but this was the kind of more practical thing, which I could really do, right?

SB: It’s “88 Seconds” in a sculpture.

AK: It’s kind of this motion, this spin, my kind of physical impulse, and this rotation, and then it’s all of it.

SB: That’s so fascinating. I mean, it makes me think also—not to bring Sugimoto up again, but I guess I’ll bring him up again. His [“Theaters”] series of cinema photographs, where he would photograph the length of an entire movie, and what you would see is just the light.

AK: Yeah, it’s so good. I love them.

SB: It’s sort of that in the inverse, in a way.

AK: Yeah. It says the other way somehow, yeah.

SB: The other way around. [Laughter]

AK: Yeah, yeah. I love those pieces.

SB: I know you don’t seek to make art explicitly about your life, but I feel like this is a portrait show [laughs]: I have to ask some personal questions, or at least did want to ask a little bit about your upbringing. You were born in Communist Poland, in 1979, and escaped with your family to West Germany, in 1987, when you were 8. Your mother was a cultural scientist?

AK: Mm-hmm.

SB: And your father was a gallery owner and art conservator. You’ve said that you know you wanted to be an artist since the age of 5.

AK: I don’t know exactly, it was the age of 5 [laughter], but it was of course… I mean, due to my family actually, it was probably, I just remember seeing since I’m 5, quite clearly, right?

SB: Art was probably all around you, with your dad.

AK: Art was all around me. I always feel like it’s so boring because it’s so typical, but I was just drawing a lot as a child, it was like my form of playing. I was just drawing, because if I’ve been playing, I’ve been drawing. So it was kind of clear, so everybody was like, “She’s going to be an artist.” I was like, “I’m going to be an artist.” That was very clear; it was not like a question for a second. So I’ve been never thinking anything. It was not a decision, I was just never considering anything else somehow.

SB: There was a story I came across, where you were talking about how your father would have you thinking about the universe, not fairy tales so much. Rather than reading fairy tales, it was almost thinking about the endlessness of outer space.

AK: Yes, that’s true. There were two things. It was like my grandmother, who was reading me the Old Testament, these kinds of horror stories. 

SB: [Laughs]

AK: Then, on the other hand, my dad was just, I think sometimes he was just probably too tired also, to invent stories, and he was just telling me to try to imagine the endless universe, and this infinity—to imagine the infinity. This is the best recipe to make a child sleep because it’s really hard to imagine that. [Laughter]

SB: “Oh, my brain’s tired, I’m going to go to bed.” [Laughs]

AK: I was really trying to imagine that and trying, and I still remember, I was trying to think it. I was trying, okay, I was trying to go in between the stars and see those little dots, and think is it this or something else? I don’t know. So yes, it was very true.

SB: Not to get too on the nose about it, but your work does explore constellations [laughs], so I do find it sort of fascinating. Could you talk about your family’s journey to Poland from Germany? What do you remember from that?

AK: All of it, almost. I mean, I’ve been a child, but I was 8 already. I went to school in Poland. My brother did. Yeah, my dad, as you said, he was running a gallery for contemporary art, and my mom was a professor at university for cultural studies, and also a Slavicist. They’d never been happy in the system, because the system was kind of cutting a lot of what my father’s ideas had been. He was faced with many restrictions. They didn’t like what he was showing, mostly abstract art, which was not very well seen. There was always some kind of pressure and problems. Then they also started to somehow get involved, or interested in the Solidarność movement, which was also not very helpful.

They decided to leave the country, but I had no clue, of course—I didn’t know. The only thing which kind of came across, and which is kind of funny, that in school, during the break, other kids would say, “Don’t tell anyone,” and “I’m not allowed to tell, but we are leaving to the U.S.” Then somebody else would say, “Don’t tell anyone. We can’t say, but I think we are leaving to Great Britain.” I had no clue. I was just like, “I think we are going on holiday somewhere in Germany, I think.” Basically, Germany was not even the place to go. I think my dad wanted to go to Australia back then, because Australia back then was inviting Eastern European academics, as they had a need for people. They’ve been inviting us to come over through the embassy somehow. I don’t know exactly how it went, because of course, we’d been not allowed to leave the country. When we crossed the border… I just remember we had this little Fiat, Polski Fiat, this little car. Then we’d been just allowed to leave the country, the four of us, for a wedding, a family wedding in France, because we have some family over there. So that’s what I believed, and what it was pretending to be. We went on holidays to France, but I just remember the situation on the border, where my mom, she bought dollars somewhere from, this is what you could do somehow. She would put these dollars all over my clothes and my brother’s clothes.

SB: Like, stuff you with dollar bills?

AK: Yeah, stuff it all over us. [Laughter] Then she was saying, “You’re sleeping, you’re asleep, you’re sleeping.” I was like, “Fine.” I just hear this dog, dogs barking, people have been opening our car all over, because they’ve been looking for things, right? Because if you would like to leave the country, you would for sure take dollars or more stuff, or whatever. We’d been pretending not to leave the country, because otherwise they would not have let us pass the border.

This is what I remember. The next thing I remember is that there was an aunt who appears, but first, we’d been to some refugee camps. It was the usual story of all refugees. So we’ve been to different kinds of refugee camps, and then this aunt appeared, and she somehow helped us to stay, or to get German papers, even that we are not German at all, but somehow [laughs] you just need a bit of a Jewish background and a bit of a German somebody, and then voilà. We got these German papers, and they changed our names. It was a bit weird. Then the journey actually stopped, so we never made it further, because I think my parents had been just lucky to get help and to stay there.

SB: What was it like assimilating into German culture? You were in Hanover?

AK: Yes. We ended up in Hanover, which could not be more German than this. Probably because we are talking about time, this was probably my first time travel somehow, because it was insane. [Laughter] I’m deeply grateful for that, that I’ve been able to experience these two completely different systems, completely different lives. I wasn’t missing anything in Poland. It was all great, I had a lucky childhood. It was all good. We had a great family. But then I had no clue what was on this other side of this Iron Curtain, and not even an idea. Of course, I had a slight idea what the West could be through some movies, which kind of slipped through, but not in real life somehow.

I was completely overwhelmed. It was not a very positive thing, to be honest. It was not like, “Wow, this is the West, super cool. I can have everything, and it’s so colorful here.” It was more like a complete feeling of being overwhelmed, and noise everywhere. Too much of stuff, too many people, too much stuff, too much movement, whatever. Being thrown at this capitalistic system, which also, when I look back at that, this is why I’m calling it time travel, it was like I traveled into the future, but this future was also a past, but it didn’t know it. It was very intense.

SB: Then what is it, just a few years later, the Berlin Wall comes down?

AK: Yes. Nobody was expecting that.

SB: Did living on both sides of the Wall, and then watching it come down, how did that impact your thinking about reality and perception?

AK: Mine, not so much, because I was still too young, a little bit. I mean, I was like, whatever, 10 or something, so I noticed it. I was just surprised seeing my parents being in a very strange mood about it—they’ve been not believing that, they’ve been just not believing. It was like you’re watching that on TV again and again, to make it be true somehow. I think especially for them, it must have been really hard. They just left their whole lives behind. Then just a couple of two years later, it ended somehow. But I remember that they’ve been not trusting the situation, and we’ve been not going back until ’94 or something, because they’ve been like, very unsure. [Laughs]

SB: So it was five years, wow.

AK: Yeah. I just remember that I was like, it was pretty hard even to call back then, to call Poland. I remember then, me as a child, I would dial forever, “zero-zero-four-eight.” It took hours to get through [laughs] on the phone. I remember that night, or those days, it was my job to try to call through the family in Poland, to ask them if that is real and what’s happening over there. I mean, I wasn’t even asking them. I wasn’t managed to talk to them, it was just my job to dial the number all over it, pass the phone to my parents.

SB: That had to feel disorienting, though, with your parents. You seeing one thing happening and your parents being disbelieving, almost.

AK: Yeah.

SB: I want to bring up when you were a teenager, you’ve said you were a fan of Salvador Dalí and Harry Houdini, who remains one of your heroes. The Financial Times has noted the “disquieting trickery” of your work. [Laughter] You’ve been really interested in this sort of intersection between science and suspicion, so I was hoping you’d just speak a little bit to this Dalí-Houdini reality/magic aspect of your practice and engagement, and interest since your teen years.

AK: I’m not sure where it can start here. I’ve always been very fascinated about magic and magicians, but it took me a while to understand why I am so fascinated about it. Then I figured out that it is because of the lack of my senses, the errors in my senses. Even if you know how a magic trick works, and you look at it twenty times, even if you know what it is, your senses are not able to catch it, because they work around you. They are faster, they do things, or they distract you, so they point somewhere, and then you’re going to look. It was like an eye-opener to notice how easy it is to trick us. It’s so easy. Then we are getting completely unsure about everything, anything, and this was a moment when, I started to include that a bit in my work, doing these reflections, which are not reflections really, so you don’t know.

SB: It’s your optical illusions.

AK: Optical illusions. People are appearing and disappearing in a room somehow, like a magical thing.

SB: Connecting two rocks that aren’t the same rock, but they look like the same rock.

AK: Yes. But they look like, and depending on your point of view… It’s more about this awareness of these limitations of our senses. If you are aware of that, the entire world becomes very uncertain and unreal. It is a fact, actually, because if you know about things, I mean, almost no matter exists; it’s like an empty space with a couple of atoms, and then still we believe [ourselves] to be us. It gets very, very weird when you think about it deeper. [Laughter] This is how I kind of shifted in it. Salvador Dalí was more like, I think, a teenage-love accident. I would not say it is… I have fun with Salvador still, and I think—

SB: Yeah, it’s not like an obvious reference in your art. I mean, maybe some of the early mirror works, but—

AK: Yeah. It’s not never been something I would refer to. I think it needs to be seen differently. Salvador, in his time, was fascinated by science, which came up with those topics in his presence. All these stories about time, that time is not constant, fluid thing, all that came up. Not just him, but also [Kazimir] Malevich, and all these people, they’ve been all working on that. So this was a movement, but he was illustrating it more than probably the others would. That’s why it’s something as an artist, who is easy to be understood when you’re very young, right, somehow.

SB: Right.

AK: But indeed, it was one of my first exhibitions I have seen, back in, I have no idea how old I was, probably I was 10 or something, or 11. We’d been in Paris with my family, and there was this Salvador Dalí exhibition, and I really wanted to see it, but we had not enough money to go with this entire family, so we had to make a choice, and I was the lucky one. [Laughter]

SB: Little did your parents know. [Laughter]

AK: Yeah.

SB: It’s interesting, I didn’t even think about that with the aspect of Dalí sort of stretching and squeezing time via these clocks in his work.

AK: It’s very much about that. I know that he was very much fascinated about these new theories which came up back then, which have been revolutionary for the entire generation.

SB: I did want to mention an early work of yours, where you were really questioning the value of things, and researching diamonds. This led you to create a sound piece, in which you pulled together various audio clips from films featuring the moment when someone sees a diamond. [Laughter]

AK: True.

SB: Could you talk about that project? [Editor’s note: The sound installation in discussion was part of the work “Grosses C,” from 2003 and part of a private collection in Germany. One element of the piece is a sound collage made from 150 movies featuring scenes in which women receive diamonds.] And I, unfortunately, don’t know that anyone can listen to this.

AK: It’s somewhere.

SB: I imagine it’s a fascinating sound piece.

AK: Yeah, we should find it actually. It’s somewhere, but—

SB: If can you can find it, I want to—

AK: Yeah, you’re bringing it back to my mind. [Laughter] I have to ask my studio.

SB: If you can find this thing, I would love to put it on the podcast. [Laughs]

AK: It would be great. I will ask my studio. It’s a really funny piece, I should expose it somewhere again. [Plays 3 minutes and 19 seconds of “Grosses C.”] 

So yeah, it’s just this moment. I’m always kind of looking at how we are looking at the world, who’s teaching us, how we accept systems, and how we accept things. There’s nothing like value or time, or whatever. Basically, there’s not much, just void and a few atoms. But we have to believe in things, and we have to accept things together, otherwise it would not work out. For some reasons, we decided that a diamond is a very, very, very valuable, beautiful thing to have. Probably not just decided, because we love light. We had this light thing before, because we are dependent on light, so we love things which are reflective, like gold and diamonds, and all those kinds of things. This is rare, but not as rare actually. But then we have been educated to take it as something very special. How this education goes is that, yeah, of course, we learn from books, from literature, from poetry, from movies, from theaters. That’s what we learn, and then we believe that this is something which is desired to have. 

What I did was that I was looking at all these kind of funny movies, I was doing many works with those kinds of movies, like found footage. It was from movies. Then there was always this scene where mostly women, of course, is getting a diamond offered. And then she says, “Oh, my God, it’s so big!” So I’ve been cutting all the scenes together, and it really sounds like a porn. It’s like a porn. [Laughter] It’s like a massive, massive porn scene. But it’s just, it’s not, but then it gets absurd, because this is what we learn. This is what we learn about.

SB: The absurdity of humanity, there we are again.

AK: It’s comically absurd. So yeah, it’s fun. It’s always fun, because when I observe people listening to it, they feel really ashamed, like witnessing whatever, listening to whatever. [Laughs] But it’s just a stupid kind of way of teaching us what we should kind of desire to be. Also as a woman, especially, it’s always the same story. It’s, like, as if it could not be the other way, but it’s always the same thing, right? It’s really absurd. I called it “The Big C,” actually, that was the title.

SB: “The Big C”?

AK: C, because it’s just a chemical element.

SB: You’ve made a few works that I would describe as artifacts. One of them is this chalice-shaped vessel called “iPhone,” from 2017. It’s made of ground-up iPhone [laughs], epoxy resin, glass, and brass. Another is an urn-shaped vessel called “Computer (PowerMac),” also from 2017, that’s a ground-up computer, epoxy resin, glass, and brass. Do you view these as being in conversation with ancient objects? [Laughs] What was your thinking there? I look at them as a way of linking the Anthropocene on some level, or this sort of planned-obsolescence world we live in, with objects that were being produced centuries ago.

AK: Yes and no. It’s not so much about ancient whatever, prehistorical whatever, historical objects that much; it’s about what an object is, and again, what an object is in your hand; and how you learn to see it and recognize it, and what it really is or not is; and how we create a world made of objects, which we give a use and a name. They exist, because they would not exist if they would not have a name. There’s a lot of computer-based work behind this work even—you can’t really see it. 

I wanted to create a very obvious object of another object, but still keeping it as true as possible. It’s really just an iPhone. It’s a pure iPhone grinded with a super high-tech company in Germany, it’s like a recycling company, so they take those things apart, and then they grind them, so it’s all grinded in the same size. Then we put each little part of the object, before we send it to the company, on a precision weight, so we could calculate the exact volume of all the parts of this object. Then we had this volume on a computer, like a 3-D volume, and so we played around shaping it in different other objects, like a vase or a pot, or whatever. Then the key question appeared: Which vase? Which pot? I mean, there’s tons of designs. So we took vases from two thousand years ago, whatever we could get from the computer, we built these 3-D forms, then we merged that all together, and there was the vase or the pot. [Laughs]

SB: So I wasn’t totally wrong. [Laughter]

AK: You’re not totally wrong, there’s something there. When I did it, it was not so much about this history of this old ancient object, it was more about, for me, is just something like the object, which we all somehow have in our minds, which has been growing, which is growing with each generation, and each new design or form, and then it’s getting this object somehow. But it was not it. Because it was for the phone, so it’s more like what is it? Who’s saying, and who’s giving things names? They just exist because we call them an “arch,” or what is it. [Laughter]

SB: Does this connect in some way to your engagement and interest, and use of chairs? I wanted to ask why chairs, and what is it about chairs that fascinates you? How do you see their use in your work?

AK: Yes, there’ve been a lot of chairs recently, somehow. [Laughter] Those objects appeared in my work quite early as well, with the same question: What is an object? Where is the border between the object and the other object, or the world, or the air, whatever you like? First of all, what is making an object be an object? So what is making the tree being a chair? The way for a tree to become a chair, for example, it could be also plastic, whatever. But let’s take this example, it’s easier. It’s a social interaction which was needed to place our bodies for a social interaction. We needed something to do a social interaction with our bodies, because we cannot separate the social interaction in the bodies. There was a need to sit together and to talk to each other, or to eat at a table, which developed through many centuries.

We created this object—the chair—which is much more, for me, still a social interaction. It’s an object, but it is also like a portrait of a human being, because it has our body size, even if it’s, of course, an average thing, which I also got very obsessed with, this average industry kind of standards and sizes, which we use to build the world, because we could not build anything [otherwise]. If we would really make it individual, it would be impossible. So you would have small and big chairs. Impossible for the system. So yes, this is why this chair kind of appeared. But also, I love the irony about it, because it’s also between a throne and a loo. It’s between the highest and the lowest. [Laughter]

SB: The crown and shit. [Laughs]

AK: Exactly. [Laughs]

SB: You do this really incredible thing, which is, and maybe this is a good point to bring up your spheres, your engagement with stone spheres, which I would say now play an outsized role in your practice. These spheres are all over the world now. [Laughs]

AK: Yes, it’s funny.

SB: They’re at Storm King, they’re at the Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark, they’ve been on the Met rooftop. [Laughs]

AK: Yeah.

SB: You’ve said that it was only in 2017 that you came across these spheres, and started thinking about them as a potential medium for your work. How did you realize spheres would be something that…? What about them appealed?

AK: Not at all at first. It was very coincidental, but it was a background. I was trying to explain, I’ve been so much in this [trying to] understanding times, the universe, movement in the universe. Automatically, of course, you end up with spheres, right? I mean, we are living on one, so it’s not so far, right? We are living on a sphere. But then atoms, all of that movement, rotational movements everywhere. Everywhere, those movements, creating kind of spheres, if you like it. It’s a bit simple to call it all “spheres,” but let’s call it spheres for now. All the spheres have been in my head all the time. 

One of my friends, he’s a stonemason. Now, he owns a company—they do gravestones, actually. But he’s working with stones. His family has been working with stones for, like, two hundred fifty years. He’s just sending me pictures from wherever he is on this planet that he thinks might be interesting for me. 

It was shortly before I participated in the Venice Biennale, and then he sent me this picture of a yard somewhere, and it was full of spheres. I was like, “What the hell is that?” It looked like a multiverse, or it looked like an illustration of atoms, or something like that. I was like, “What is that?” He was like, “Oh, I’m here with my friend [Josef] Gajek.” He owned a company that did these very kitschy fountains, which had been in, in the eighties and nineties, where you had this sphere, and there was kind of floating on water, and you could kind of easily rotate it. That was his income, that was his job. Then somehow nobody wanted those anymore, so he has this yard full of those leftover spheres. I was just saying, “Frank [Rüdiger], this is insane, just get me those spheres. I have no idea what to do with them, but get me them.” So he got me those spheres.

SB: I just have to interrupt, because you started this interview by talking about how time is kitsch [laughs], and you’re taking these kitsch objects and actually turning [them into artworks about time]—It’s beautiful.

AK: Yeah, absolutely. I got the spheres, but they’ve been tiny, I mean, small.I thought it’s exactly, it was really too kitsch like even they’ve been beautiful. I asked my friend, Frank, if he can ask his friend—Gajek, is his last name. He’s from the same city that I am from in Poland, so we have this connection somehow. He was like—

SB: Oh, so these spheres were coming from Poland?

AK: Yes. The guy who’s producing it, he’s like a Polish refugee, as I have been, so there was some sympathy, let’s say. But yes, they’re produced in Poland. I’d been asking him if he’s able to do it bigger, and he was like, “Not sure, but let’s give it a try.” Back then, the company was closed—they hadn’t been working any longer. So indeed, I’ve been bringing this company back to life. Since then, they’re doing those spheres for me. They’ve gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and very handmade. It’s not far from the city where I grew up, in Poland.

SB: Wow.

AK: Yeah, that was a story.

SB: Literally full circle. [Laughs]

AK: Yes, full circle. [Laughs] 

SB: Sorry, couldn’t help myself there. [Laughter]

AK: Somehow, it started to roll. [Laughter]

SB: Just to bring the chairs back into the conversation, you have merged these chairs and these spheres in a way that is so… I mean, it is optical illusion, but it’s also saying something about time and humanity, and the absurdity of being on the planet. I mean, I’m sure you could speak to all that. 

One of the images of these works, which I didn’t get to see in person, but I saw in preparation for this, was a fifteen-sphere tall installation you did in Hong Kong, one of these, I mean, just extraordinary. I don’t know if you could explain that a little bit, but it’s literally a vertical stack of these chairs and spheres.

AK: Yes. I mean, technically, the chairs are bronze, of course, otherwise it would not function. The stones are stones, the spheres are stones. There’s a big bolt of course, which is going through it. Especially in Hong Kong, we had to make sure it is this typhoon-safe, and this safe. They have really hard winds. So yeah, I combined it. I don’t know, even when I came up with this idea.

It is also very much ironic. It was like, yeah, exactly, about our position on this planet, which is kind of more than ironic when I look at it. Then there’s these little human creatures, and everybody’s trying to elevate and sit on this throne, and get higher and higher. It’s like the Tower of Babel a little bit, like trying to reach the stars and invent a new system, and elevate it above the other system, and believing this is better than the other one has been, until somehow trying to reach the stars, but we never will. So it was very much about this, yeah, but also sitting on top of it, or under it, depending how you see it. Let’s see. [Laughs] It’s very much about this. For me, they’re different options of a planet, of a possible planet of us, of our existence actually, of our systems, our world.

SB: You’ve spent a lot of time with these stones, and lots of different types of stones, I should say too. I mean, the Met rooftop installation had stones from nine different points around the planet. What has working with all these different types of stones taught you about the world, about time?

AK: It’s just really so enriching for me to learn about those things. When I started to work on this, I mean, I had not really such a deep knowledge about it, and I’m still learning. It was really mapping out the sphere where we are all living on, and also scratching it a bit, to get the real face of it, or to make a portrait of the world. Because those stones, they look beautiful with all those veins, and they are pretty, but they’re very brutal. Those veins are the most brutal events on this planet—volcanic eruptions, species dying out, like so… Like happenings, you know? 

I got fascinated with this combination of beauty, but all these impacts, and this compression of time. It’s millions and millions of years of time. It’s not just ten thousand, one hundred thousand years. This is so mind-blowing, because we can… I don’t know about you, but I can probably think back in my knowledge: one thousand years, easy. Two thousand years? Okay. Four thousand? Still okay. Then it gets a bit more difficult—six, eight. I’m out at ten [laughter] when I somehow try really to say that I know something about it. Then if you try to just imagine a million years—of course, you can look up a book and see what was happening back then—but actually, it’s too big to understand.

SB: Even half a million.

AK: Yeah, it’s too big. It’s not there. It’s not in the sphere on our shoulders. That was somehow the fascination of it. Then to see that, depending on where they’re coming from, they have these different colors and patterns because of the different events on this planet. It’s probably the truest witness of what happened here.

SB: The stone that really shook me, that I saw, was the one—I think it was from Finland—at the Met.

AK: It’s the green one.

SB: It looked… It’s like the Blue Marble photograph in a stone.

AK: Oh, no. The blue one is from Brazil, it’s Azul Macauba.

SB: So incredible.

AK: Yes, it’s incredible.

SB: Unbelievable. I mean, actually, that installation, I think it was Jason Farago, writing in The New York Times, he nailed the description of your work in a way that I thought was so beautiful, which he described it as a “compelling synthesis of sculpture, city, and universe,” and a “model for how we can accept and admire the unfathomability of things.” I think this idea of unfathomability, and really leaning in to not knowing, is what I so appreciate about your work as an artist—that we so often want to find answers to things when there are actually really no answers to be found.

AK: That’s true. I think it’s really a big relief to accept that, that there are no answers and there never will be. [Laughs]

SB: Let’s end the conversation on humor. We touched on humor, but you’ve said that many of the concepts you deal with in your work are “so impossible to fully comprehend that all you can do is laugh.” [Laughs]

AK: Yeah, absolutely.

SB: Elsewhere, you’ve said that we humans are “absurd creatures” [laughs]—I think we’ve touched on that today—and I think it’s pretty funny to imagine, simply just imagining all of us, you and me sitting here, we’re on this spinning globe, there’s something kind of just hilarious about the reality of that. Beautiful, too, and wondrous, and all of that, but also funny.

AK: No, it’s super funny. We look funny. Now we have a bunch of hair on the top of our heads, it’s kind of… All of that is absurd and funny. I think for animals, we [humans] look absurd, it must be really funny. But all of that is, it’s sad and absurd, but this is what humor is, or I think it always has a little tragic drop in it as well. It’s why you have to laugh about it, because first of all, it’s this acceptance of not knowing, not having any clue about what’s happening out there, trying to search for those answers with no hope to ever get them. 

Then, what makes me really love about us human beings, that we are taking ourselves as so important, and we are trying to elevate ourselves, all these people in power and stuff, it’s just funny. That’s absurd. It’s funny. [Laughs] Who is saying why this guy or this woman thinks he or she is strong or better? What the hell, we are all the same. Actually, why? Just to escape finity, just to escape, just to make a little scratch, which will be washed away anyway. It makes no sense at all. This is a tragic point about it as well, because there’s no need for it at all. Why the hell are we inventing these things, like racism, like this, like that? What for? Why? There’s not one true thing in it. The sad thing is for me, that even if it is explainable, you could explain things to people, and you would think, “Okay, if they understand, it should be clear,” it’s still not. It’s still not the solution. I’m not a fan of hierarchies. I don’t believe in all of this. It’s like a funny theater. It’s like a commedia dell’arte. I don’t know, it’s just very—

SB: Do you think that your work, on some level, is a celebration of that mindset, or an embrace of that mindset of—?

AK: It’s kind of, yeah, probably an embrace of that. I don’t know if it’s a celebration, because there’s nothing to celebrate, it’s kind really… It’s like, yeah, it’s—

SB: An acknowledgement—an acceptance.

AK: Yeah, it’s like a satiric, probably ironic way of dealing with this for myself as well. [Laughs]

SB: Well, Alicja, thank you so much for coming in today.

AK: No, thank you so much. It was fun.

This interview was recorded in The Slowdown’s New York City studio on April 23, 2025. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Kylie McConville, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Paola Wiciak based on a photograph by Doro Zinn.