Desire Path

I like to build narrative worlds. They are speculative ecosystems, composed of elements from the built environment and from nature. To me it’s like making sense out of chaos, forming it like poetry. (Agata Ingarden)

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 selfcontained 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. The installation Like Mushrooms after Rain (2019) evokes, through the image of the mushroom (a symbol of rhizomes, networks, and unpredictable growth), 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.

SG A central work that marks the beginning of the exhibition is Like Mushrooms after Rain (2019). It is a large-scale sculpture composed of steel, acoustic foam, carbonised sugar, oyster shells, salt, double sided mirror. How did the work come about?

AI We were in a residency in Tilburg with curator and friend Arkadiusz Półtorak, discussing mushrooms, motherhood and gluing oyster shells together.
The work grew from an interest in energy transfer. I wanted to make a sculpture that behaved like a transformer — absorbing, dripping, never fully stable. It was maybe like an alchemical equation, a machine that could both generate and dissolve forms and meaning.

SG Here, a wide variety of materials and techniques converge…

AI I combine industrial structures, found objects with organic or transmutable matter: sugar, salt, oyster shells, fungi, mirrors, steel, elevator parts, office blinds ... I like when materials speak for themselves and I try to follow their own logic, looking for a hidden pattern of how things could come together or how seemingly distant objects share affinities.

SG Mutable components such as foam crystallised in salt or carbonised sugar are materials that recur in your practice. We encounter it not as a passive mass, but as an active, acting mass. The sculptures in the exhibition are works of art that are in motion and inhabit the space. What led you to work with transformable materials?

AI I have this dichotomy in me. On one hand I love to build logical systems and efficient structures. And another part of me craves the disorder. The mistake often leads to a new discovery. I like when matter resists the control we try to bestow upon it. The sugar reacts to the humidity and temperature of the space — it can solidify or melt. It fluctuates. It reminds us that nothing is fixed, everything is change. Octavia E. Butler’s story Parable of the Sower is an inspiration to me in this regard.

SG Not only does the material itself play a formative role, but so does the environment. How relevant do you consider the environment of the artwork to be?

AI The works don’t stop at their borders — they infect the space. Light, humidity, sound all become part of the piece, and the place itself reacts back to the work.

SG For a long time, humans believed that they could organise and control their environment. However, if we look at geological processes over long periods of time, we see that materials are constantly making decisions — completely independently of us as humans. How do you see the relationship between humans and the environment?

AI Humans often try to dominate their environment, but materials and nature make their own decisions. In the long run, we should observe and learn how to create symbiotic relationships with our surroundings.

SG You had UV prints of paths or maps put on the framed copper plates. Where do they take us?

AI They’re mind maps, entrances to parallel systems. They don’t show where to go, but how to get lost. They are scraps of memories, drawings, notes — blueprints of the ideas that construct the different worlds I am building. It’s abstract landscapes that I observe after and trace some ideas and draw parallels.

SG You like to use the poetic, metaphorical image of an entropic landscape to show how orderly or disorderly a system is in certain conditions. This image is characterised by continuous change and constant decline in meaning. When we enter the first exhibition room, which you have given the subtitle The World, do we enter such a landscape?

AI Yes. It’s a terrain of constant change, a place where forms dissolve, yet I don't see it as a decline in meaning. The belly, the transformer, is feeding the other rooms of the exhibition. Entropy here is not just collapse but also transformation, an ongoing redistribution of energy that expands outward. Entropy often is associated with loss, when in fact it is the very condition that allows every living form to grow.

The Home

The middle floor is dedicated to domestic space – a place of belonging and protection. 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) 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 per-meable 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.

SG We are entering a different spatial atmosphere: The Home. Here, the hanging light sculptures from the Hours of Dog series (2020–2025) are combined with videos from The House series (2018). How do you interpret the concept of home in relation to this combination of works?

AI For me, home is less a fixed place than a set of relations. Fragile, temporary shelters between people, stories and objects. In the Hours of Dog sculptures, models of buildings that often surround where my studio was, are covered with oyster shells and become cloud structures hovering above the ground, marking my constant displacement as well. In The House video series, home is an empty rental holiday house. While abandoned it becomes an animated reality, a body with organs, sounds and moods. A porous architecture sensitive to its surroundings. Together, they reflect on home as both a shelter and an organism, intimate and unstable. A place that exists more in the mind than in the physical realm.

SG You use contrasting materials such as oyster shells and office blinds for your light sculptures. They are reminiscent of remote dwellings or jelly-fish-like creatures gliding through the vastness of the ocean. What role does the contrast between natural and industrial materials play in your works, and what significance do the associations that arise in the viewer have?

AI A shell is a singular shelter. Together they form a mass. It’s a contrast between different orders — the natural patterns of shells and growth, and our attempts to impose our systems onto nature, onto ourselves. This friction creates dissonance, but also opens space for viewers’ associations. For me these works are related to contemporary capitals, how the public space we’re building affects us as well. How disconnected we are from nature and each other.

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 depen-dencies. 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.

SG Social Security combines melting sugar, surveillance technology and domestic motifs such as the subtitles Grandma’s Cupboard and Bathroom Fridge. How does this combination address the fragile balance between care and control in the private sphere?

AI These pieces are between comfort and intrusion. They refer to the domestic objects in the most private spaces. Grandma’s Cupboard hides stories, dreams of the past, affection and trauma. Maybe some sweets as well. The camera is an attempt to peek into this hidden box of secrets. It’s an intrusion in the private sphere but also in some way a protection from the outside world. The surveillance crawls even there, regulating our basic needs, instinct and emotions. All being examined becomes a mass of data, feeding a system that will then present us with a reality specifically tailored to us.

Sugar is important as well. Its impact on our bodies, along with its inevitable presence in the most affordable processed foods, made me reflect on its poisonous effects. It became a source of anxiety, especially as economic realities often leave no choice but to submit to the cheaper energy source that so severely harms our health. Control is exerted from the inside, both emotionally and physically.

SG In Social Security, how do you connect external social control through surveillance with the idea of internal control or introspective vision, as suggested by the room title The Self?

AI The piece holds something precious and alive inside. The element inside influences the form of the container and the form of the glass. The deformed lens changes how we can experience what’s inside as well. Dark sugar fluid is emotionally charged. To me it’s the subconscious. Maybe also our instincts and desires. The light turns on as we pass, and the mechanical eye observes the observer and itself, monitoring its own internal processes.
Surveillance is not only outside, it’s also how we monitor ourselves.

SG Sugar drips, the camera watches and the home becomes permeable. Is Social Security a meditation on the gradual disappearance of security in a world that observes everything and forgets nothing?

AI For me it’s also about what it means to feel safe in public and private spaces today, when the borders between them dissolve.
Sugar melts, the camera records endlessly but memory fades. Who is watching it actually? It seems in constant monitoring of everything, amid a flood of information we have externalised the memory to our devices and hardly recall what happened just last week.

SG You chose the exhibition title Desire Path. What is the meaning behind this term and how does it connect the different groups of works across the three floors of the Kunsthalle?

AI A desire path is a shortcut carved by footsteps outside planned routes. It’s a metaphor for deviation, for small resistances that create new ways of moving through the world and against an imposed system. It is also the trace of animals, showing the most efficient or instinctive routes between food, water, shelter or safe passage. The landscape is shaped by repeated need and movement, where desire and intuition are the guide. The works across the three floors are like those paths: unpredictable trails between world, home and self. The floor upstairs is the culmination where you can trace your own way through it.

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); 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 (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.