At Kunstmuseum / Kunsthalle Appenzell in Switzerland, Agata Ingarden unfolds Desire Path across three floors and three existential registers: The World, The Home, The Self.
Ingarden's practice has always moved between registers that resist easy separation — the organic and the industrial, the intimate and the surveillant, the familiar and the deeply alien. Born in Poland in 1994 and now living between Paris and Athens, she trained at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris and Cooper Union New York before building a body of work that deploys installations, sculptures, and video to construct what she calls speculative futures beyond anthropocentric perspective. At Appenzell, this ambition finds its most expansive staging to date.
The ground floor is given over to The World, anchored by "Like Mushrooms after Rain" (2019) — copper mirror objects oxidised with salts and chemicals, arranged as windows into other universes and mental maps. The mushroom is a recurring figure in Ingarden's thinking: symbol of the rhizome, of unpredictable lateral growth, of the non-hierarchical networks that living systems actually use. The objects multiply and scatter, their tarnished surfaces holding the room in a state of constant iridescent flux.
The middle floor is The Home: a terrain of projection and protection at once. The series "Hours of Dog" (2020–2025) presents sculptural forms condensed from oyster shells and building fragments, neon light glowing from within to illuminate small model windows. The title invokes the twilight hour when day and night coexist — when the familiar and the unfamiliar occupy the same threshold, when the dog becomes the wolf. A suite of video works from 2018 — "The Arm," "The Eyes," "The Ears," "The Womb," "The House," "The Garden" — collectively animate the dwelling as a living organism, its walls less barrier than permeable membrane between psyche and world.
The top floor arrives at The Self, and here Ingarden's work sharpens into something that approaches critique. "Social Security (Grandma's Cupboard)" and "Social Security (Bathroom Fridge)" (both 2022) frame familiar domestic objects within a wall of monitors fed by real-time camera transmissions, the building's own security feed pulled into the gallery space. The glass ceiling is exposed. Reflections multiply. The work makes transparency feel like a threat. "The fragility of security" is the phrase in the exhibition notes — and it lands precisely because Ingarden builds the experience from materials we recognise as shelter.
Desire Path ran from October 2025 to February 2026 at Kunstmuseum / Kunsthalle Appenzell. It is the work of an artist who has trained at the highest levels and chosen, against the current tendency toward legibility, to remain difficult — to keep her work at that productive edge where alien and familiar are still deciding which one to become.
