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.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Christian Tomaszewski, Fellows. Retrieved May 12, 2025.Schwendener, Martha. "Christian Tomaszewski: Strolling Within the Strange World of 'Blue Velvet,'" The New York Times, June 8, 2007. Retrieved May 12, 2025.Temple University. C.T. Jasper, Faculty, Tyler School of Art. Retrieved May 12, 2025. His artwork includes installation, video, film, sound, sculpture and printed matter.Vali, Murtaza. "Christian Tomaszewski: On Chapels, caves and Erotic Misery," Art Review, October 2007.Kościuczuk, Krzysztof. "Christian Tomaszewski" Frieze, January 1, 2013. Retrieved May 12, 2025.Meier, Allison. "Strange Creatures and Constructions Alight on the High Line," Hyperallergic, November 8, 2017. Retrieved May 12, 2025. 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.Johnson, Ken. "Christian Tomaszewski," The New York Times, June 18, 2004. Retrieved May 12, 2025.Shuster, Robert. "Ears to David Lynch!" The Village Voice, June 5, 2007. Retrieved May 12, 2025.Voorhies, James. "Christian Tomaszewski," in Of Other Spaces, Columbus, OH: Columbus College of Art & Design, 2009, p. 70–76. Critic Lilly Wei characterized these interventions as "laced with sociopolitical issues, as viewed through a skeptical but romantic lens."Wei, Lilly. "Poland's Venice Pavilion Explores Haiti's Polish Connection,", ARTnews, April 29, 2015. Retrieved May 12, 2025. 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.Sansom, Anna. "C.T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska's Fitzcarraldo-inspired Halka/Haiti,", Whitewall, May 18, 2015. Retrieved May 12, 2025. Their work often brings together diverse social, ethnic and artistic phenomena in explorations of cultural transmission and exchange, national and personal identity, migration and assimilation.Jachuła, Michal. "Relations Disrelations," in Joanna Malinowska C.T. Jasper: Relations Disrelations, Lodz, Poland: Muzeum Sztuki, 2015.Cornell Council for the Arts. "Joanna Malinowska + C.T. Jasper, A morning in 1953 (Messiaen Reversed, Birds Released)", 2022. Retrieved May 12, 2025.
Jasper has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Gottlieb Foundation, among others.Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Christian Tomaszewski, Artists, Lewis Center for the Arts. Retrieved May 12, 2025. He has exhibited at venues including the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Hirshhorn Museum,Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. "The Message: New Media Works," Exhibitions, 2018. Retrieved May 12, 2025. Drawing Center,The Drawing Center. Drawn From Photography, New York, 2011. Retrieved May 12, 2025. Irish Museum of Modern Art, SculptureCenterSculptureCenter. "Christian Tomaszewski: On Chapels, Caves, and Erotic Misery," Exhibitions, 2007. Retrieved May 12, 2025. and Zachęta – National Gallery of Art (Warsaw).Gratza, Agnieszka. "Project Runway," Artforum, April 30, 2013. Retrieved May 12, 2025. He is an assistant professor in sculpture at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.
Education and career Jasper was born in Gdańsk, Poland in 1971. He initially studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Poznań in Poland, earning an MFA in 1996. Shortly after graduating, he moved to New York City and worked for several years as a studio assistant and manager to conceptual artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov; their notion of "total" installation is an influence on his work.Kewenig. "Spivaks Generation," Exhibitions, 2006. Retrieved May 12, 2025. Jasper began teaching in 2007 at Princeton University; in 2009 he co-taught a course at the Princeton Atelier with Toni Morrison.Princeton University. Christian Tomaszewski, People, Lewis Center for the Arts. Retrieved May 12, 2025.Princeton University. Past Atelier Artists, Lewis Center for the Arts. Retrieved May 12, 2025. He has been at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture since 2010.
Jasper has had solo or two-person institutional exhibitions at Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz (2006), SculptureCenter (2007), Performa '09,KIno, Carol. "Art That Leaps Off the Canvas," The New York Times, October 9, 2009. Retrieved May 12, 2025. Muzeum Sztuki (Łódź, 2015), and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), among others.
Work and reception Jasper's earlier work investigated the role of cinematic, science fiction and utopian discourses in shaping collective imagination and perception. Curator James Voorhies wrote of these projects: "the political in Jasper's work is actually achieved by creating a new sensory experience in the museum. This reframing takes place when we are confused about how easily to interpret a thing, situation or experience. [His works] all instigate on various levels a productive kind of strangeness and confusion."Voorhies, James. "Something else, something more than exhibition and cinema: the art of C.T. Jasper," in Joanna Malinowska C.T. Jasper: Relations Disrelations, Lodz, Poland: Muzeum Sztuki, 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.Constantine, M. "Stories Last Longer Than Symbols," Cornell Chronicle, October 8, 2021. Retrieved May 12, 2025.Triennial Brugge. Joanna Malinowska & C.T. Jasper, Artists, 2021. Retrieved May 12, 2025. Their sculptural, performance, sound and video projects often bring disparate elements from social history, art, music and everyday life into situational encounters.Smith, Trevor. "Interview with C.T. Jasper & Joanna Malinowska," in Halka/Haiti: 18°48'05"N 72°23'01"W, C.T. Jasper & Joanna Malinowska, Warsaw/New York: Zachęta—National Gallery of Art/Inventory Press, 2015.Contemporary Lynx. "Gdańsk: C.T. Jasper & Joanna Malinowska," Exhibitions. Retrieved May 12, 2025.
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.Artpace. "When Love Turns With a Little Indulgence to Indifference or Disgust (When), Christian Tomaszewski," Exhibitions, 2009. Retrieved May 12, 2025.ING Polish Art Foundation. Christian Tomaszewski, Collection. Retrieved May 12, 2025. Among diverse projects of this period were installations that reconfigured exhibition spaces at Exit Art (2003) and Artpace (2009);Smith, Roberta. "A Space Reborn, With a Show That's Never Finished," The New York Times, October 18, 2019. Retrieved May 12, 2025. a series of tabloid-like illustrations depicting assassinated public figures such as Indira Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Grigori Rasputin ("Hunting for Pheasants," 2007–08); and Mother Earth Sister Moon (Performa '09, with Joanna Malinowska), an enormous inflated white spacesuit inspired by Soviet-bloc science-fiction films that was both a sculptural installation and performance space.
Between 2004 and 2007, Jasper produced On Chapels, Caves, and Erotic Misery, a series of installations made of cardboard in which he recreated fragments of spaces (both scale-modelled and life-sized), well-known props and views from the 1986 David Lynch film, Blue Velvet. The series' title referenced Kurt Schwitters's kaleidoscopic, layered Merzbau works, which influenced the aesthetics of some of the tableaux and overall presentation. Critics noted the installations' superimposition of different forms of representation (film, still image, text and object) onto one another and the play between fantasy and reality and memory and actuality—qualities accentuated by the fragile, ephemeral materials used. Murtaza Vali of Art Review observed, "Tomaszewski's project distinguishes itself through its postmodernist embrace of citation, its attempt to render a particular filmic phenomenology and narrative logic in real space, translating the chronological flow of sound and image into the multisensory simultaneity of an installation."
In subsequent installations, Jasper directly intervened in existing films, digitally excising all of the characters and voices from original footage through meticulous processes. Erased (2013) juxtaposed adjacent film projections of pivotal portions of Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum (1979) and Blue Velvet, emptied of human life. The resulting scenes—austere and scored with displaced ambient sounds such as footfalls, breaking glass and creaking doors punctuated by bursts of dramatic music or incomprehensible shouts—were described as haunting in their stillness and sense of estrangement. Sunset of the Pharaohs (2014) was a large-scale, camera bellows-shaped sculpture made of 160 sheepskins that was likened to a "retro-futurist" nomadic dwelling. Inside, a film projected scenes of ancient Egypt—the entirety of the 1966 Jerzy Kawalerowicz Polish film Faraon (Pharaoh)—also with all human traces removed.Sutton, Benjamin. "Frieze New York Fumbles,", Artnet, May 9, 2014. Retrieved May 12, 2025.Schwendener, Martha. "Strolling an Island of Creativity," The New York Times, May 9, 2014. Retrieved May 12, 2025. 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."
With the projects PLAYTIME (2009) and In the Dust of the Stars, Jasper examined visions of the future inspired by science-fiction movies and 20th-century visual culture that ultimately seemed anachronistic through contemporary eyes. For the PLAYTIME installation, he excised, montaged and fused the minimal modernist designs, bright colors and sounds of Jacques Tati's iconic films into a singular physical environment, conflating filmic and exhibition spaces.
Collaborations with Joanna Malinowska Jasper began collaborating regularly with Joanna Malinowska in 2015, including a two-person retrospective, "Relations Disrelations" (2015, Muzeum Sztuki), which explored relationships, connections and contrasts between their individual work.Muzeum Sztuki. "C.T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska. Relations Disrelations," Exhibitions, 2015. Retrieved May 12, 2025.