C.T. Jasper

Work

C.T. Jasper employs a wide variety of media in his work. He works primarily with video. His artistic form has elements of science-fiction literature and modern communist utopias. The installation entitled Erased (2012) is consider one of Jasper’s most important works using cinematographic images. The work consists of three videos with sound in an empty gallery space. The artist digitally modified two movies erasing all human presence from the segments of the films Blue Velvet by David Lynch and The Tin Drum by Volker Schlöndorff. A third video was a looped excerpt from Stanley Kramer’s 1995 drama On the Beach, played on a computer screen at the gallery's reception desk. Vacant gallery space merged with film space becoming one undefined place.

The work Sunset of the Pharaohs was first prepared for the Frieze Art Fair in New York (2014). The artist digitally erased all the protagonists from the Polish movie Pharaoh, directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz (1965), which was an adaptation from the 19th Century novel by Bolesław Prus. The video projection was played inside an architectural structure covered with sheep skins, recalling a nomadic lifestyle. The shape was reminiscent of a camera’s bellows. Jasper’s technique involved digital removal of the human presence in the Sunset of the Pharaohs.

In 2015, C.T. Jasper, in collaboration with Joanna Malinowska and curator Magdalena Moskalewicz, prepared a project entitled Halka / Haiti: 18 ° 48'05" N 72 ° 23'01W, commissioned by Zacheta - National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland. It was presented at the Polish Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition - Venice Biennale. The key inspiration for artists was Werner Herzog’s movie Fitzcarraldo, which main protagonist plans to build an opera in the middle of Amazonian forest. Jasper’s and Malinowska's project refers to this act in a critical way and deals with an issue of cultural colonization and oppression of European empires. Jasper and Malinowska decided to perform the opera Halka by Stanisław Moniuszko, in the town of Cazale, Haiti - a place inhabited by the descendants of the Polish soldiers from Napoleon’s legions. The opera was first staged in Vilnius in 1848 as a patriotic gesture for Polish nation. The project is exploring the problem of understanding cultural roots by confronting the community identifying with Poland on a symbolic level with a work of art which is very strongly connected to the problem of Polish patriotism and national identity. The film screening followed by a discussion with the artists was also included in the program of Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in 2015.

Collections

Jasper’s works appear in public and private collections in Poland and abroad:

Selected Exhibitions