Christian Jankowski

Jankowski does not work in the solitude of his studio but by interacting with others, allowing the unpredictability of human behavior to determine his work.

He asks us to consider what happens when the art is left in the hands of magicians, customs officers, and children? 

For My Life as a Dove, Jankowski collaborated with a magician who transformed him into a dove for a duration of three weeks. The message from the magician to the audience was "You're standing in front of Christian's transformation into a dove...be kind to him...and remember that a real artist may sometimes be inscrutable, but a true person as well." Visitors to the exhibition responded to Jankowski as dove, feeding him, taking his photograph, making video documentation, and keeping an ongoing journal of his activities.

Customs Officers from four countries neighboring Switzerland - Austria, Italy, France, and Germany - participated in Jankowski's Singing Customs Officers, originally exhibited in Switzerland in 1999. The Officers each sang their respective national anthems in front of their border checkpoints while Jankowski recorded them on video. The display at SI will consist of the receipt of the custom duties for the import of the videos as art goods and the video transmissions on monitors, facing outward atop a four sided "Swiss cross" pedestal.

Jankowski's The Matrix Effect, 2000 was created for the MATRIX series at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. For this work, rather than transform himself into a dove, Jankowski transformed the artists of the MATRIX series into children. He proposed the "Matrix effect," a supernatural age reversal of the individuals who were committed to new art, resulting in seven year old versions of John Baldessari, Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper, and others, who offer their share of commentary on contemporary art.