C.T. Jasper

C.T. Jasper + Joanna Malinowska, Halka/Haiti 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W, Multichannel video projection with sound; 82 minutes, dimensions variable, 2015. Polish Pavilion, the 56th Venice Biennale. C.T. Jasper (born Christian Tomaszewski, 1971) is a Polish-born multimedia artist and educator based on the East Coast of the US and in Gdynia, Poland. His artwork includes installation, video, film, sound, sculpture and printed matter. Jasper gained recognition in the 2000s (under his birth name) for projects in which he altered or recreated fragments of existing iconic films in order to scrutinize visual and aural cinematic language. Critic Lilly Wei characterized these interventions as "laced with sociopolitical issues, as viewed through a skeptical but romantic lens." Since 2015, he has collaborated with artist Joanna Malinowska (under the name C.T. Jasper), including a project that represented Poland at the 56th Venice Biennale.

Jasper has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Gottlieb Foundation, among others. He has exhibited at venues including the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Drawing Center, Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Zachęta – National Gallery of Art (Warsaw). He is an assistant professor in sculpture at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. Jasper began teaching in 2007 at Princeton University; in 2009 he co-taught a course at the Princeton Atelier with Toni Morrison. He has been at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture since 2010. Muzeum Sztuki (Łódź, 2015),

Jasper's collaborations with Joanna Malinowska take a more anthropological perspective, examining cultural exchange and appropriation, collective mythologies and historical narratives, and national identity. Their sculptural, performance, sound and video projects often bring disparate elements from social history, art, music and everyday life into situational encounters.

Solo work Jasper's early projects examined the influence of cinema, media, science fiction and architecture through recontextualizations or reworkings of existing forms and motifs. Among diverse projects of this period were installations that reconfigured exhibition spaces at Exit Art (2003) and Artpace (2009); Critics such as Krzysztof Kościuczuk of Frieze suggested these interventions also erased the ability to interpret plot, thus shifting attention to scenery, score, props and cinematic techniques: "Peeling off the visual layers of landmark works of American and European cinema, [Jasper] doesn't so much dissect the structure of a film itself, as the whole cinematic experience—laying bare the way in which we make sense of what we see and hear."

C.T. Jasper + Joanna Malinowska, Who is Afraid of Natasha?, Replica of the "Natasha" sculpture; video, 23 minutes, sound, 2021. Bruges Triennial 2021: TraumA, Belgium. Their Venice Biennale project, Halka/Haiti: 18° 48'05" N 72° 23'01" W (2015/2018), was inspired by a little-known historical connection between Haiti and Poland and the 1982 Werner Herzog film Fitzcarraldo, about a mad visionary obsessed with bringing live opera to the Amazon. The history involved a group of Haitian people, the Poloné, who descended from early 19th-century Polish soldiers that were sent to put down the island's slave rebellion, but instead defected.

In several projects Jasper and Malinowska took a more anthropological direction. Bureau of Masks Inventory documented the ubiquitous and odd presence of African masks and artifacts—regarded as highly coveted symbols of openness and status—in their hometown, Tricity, Poland, from the 1960s until the collapse of communism. The exhibition "In Savage Society" (2019) explored collective mythologies, historical truth and accepted narratives involving the collision of indigenous and Western cultures, with reference to the work of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. A morning in 1953 (Messiaen Reversed, Birds Released) (2022) was based on the 1953 Olivier Messiaen piano and orchestra composition, Réveil des oiseaux, which he transcribed from birdsong. In their project, the artists reversed the process, replacing the entire score's human-made sounds and instruments with the actual bird calls of the 38 species Messiaen used. Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Centre Pompidou, Hirshhorn Museum, ING Polish Art Foundation, and Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, among others.