Thus, Kurant performed the role of a person taking control over another artist's work, and an artist aware of a lack of control over her own works. Hypothetical Value, her work combining a drawing by Wilhelm Sasnal and Magic Drawing by Gianni Motti serves as the best example. Sasnal's drawing is visible only if exposed to sunlight, while Motti's work when the temperature falls below 18 degrees Celsius. Kurant's commentary to the work disappeared a few moments after it was finished. Her other work, Political Weather, (black snow, inspired by the Soviet Union's attempts to manipulate the weather in the twenties and thirties and the weather's impact itself – as a factor difficult to predict – on politics) took on an exceptional meaning after the plane crash in Smolensk on 10 April 2010, and the subsequent volcanic dust cloud from the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, an Icelandic volcano, which paralysed air traffic over Europe and prevented many guests from participating in the funeral ceremony for the President Lech Kaczyński, who died in the airplane catastrophe.
For her 2007 project Future Anterior (Thermochromic silkscreen ink on paper, 57 x 37.50 cm) the artist made an authentic issue of The New York Times dated 29th June, 2020. She invited a clairvoyant, Krzysztof Jackowski, to join the project. He conducts a business activity in the field of "paranormal services" and made a name for himself while cooperating with the police, taking part in a TV show Eksperyment jasnowidz / The Clairvoyant Experiment on Polsat channel, and providing services for Danuta Hojarska, a member of the Polish Parliament representing the Samoobrona Party. Kurant asked Jackowski to predict what is going to happen in 2020. The clairvoyant predicted the collapse of the European Union, terrorist attacks on a massive scale in Europe, an uprising against the Chinese government, and the ultimate destruction of the Amazon forest. Ten journalists from New York wrote articles based on Jackowski's predictions. This is how the content of the newspaper was created. Yet, the artist decided to use a special toner again, this time changing its qualities when exposed to temperature. The pigment is visible when it is cold and disappears when exposed to warm temperatures. As a result, the newspaper is almost impossible to be read. The text (in a sense, the future) disappears when being held in one's hands. The artist was less concerned wih the vision of the future, more with how visions of the future are interpreted in the present and how they can even affect the present, such as the trouble in bringing the disappearing newspaper into Chinese territory due to its prediction regarding the country.
In 2012, the Paris-based the Fondation Ricard included Future Anterior among the 100 projects to mark the 10th anniversary of its Pavillon Neuflize OBC, a creative laboratory located in the Palais de Tokyo. Claude Closky curated the anniversary exhibition. For ÇA & LÀ / THIS & THERE Closky spread the reach of exhibition beyond the confines of the laboratory itself, inviting each artist to present his or her work in the setting and media of their choice. Kurant chose to present her work in the urban space, allowing the fluctuating temperatures of spring to dictate how her work would appear or disappear.
A technique similar to the one used in Future Anterior or Hypothetical Value was applied in a work entitled Symfonia Tesli / Tesla Symphony Sonogram, which was created between 2007-2009 by Kurant in a cooperation with a composer, Zbigniew Karkowski. This is a symphony that cannot be heard because it is composed of infrasounds -- low-frequency sounds inaudible to humans which may, however, have influence on a person's mood, behaviour (e.g. drowsiness), and even cause physical pain. The title name corresponds to the name of a "mad" scientist, Nikola Tesla, who experimented with radio waves which he claimed he used to send messages to distant planets. The artist herself was fascinated by a message detected by a telescope in Ohio in 1978, called the "WOW signal" based on a note made by a scientist who received it. This signal was never deciphered but there have been numerous theories regarding its origin. We do not know whether it is a message sent by an extraterrestrial civilisation, or a signal sent from the Earth in the past (by Nikola Tesla, perhaps?). Kurant engraved the signal on a crystal tablet (the single understandable word for a human is the word "wow") and entitled it Language Is a Virus from Outer Space, a quotation from William Burroughs.
Invited to participate in Frieze Projects in London (2008), Kurant created a mini-zoo of three parrots (Ready Unmade). These were not regular parrots - at the artists' request, Marek Żyłkowski, head of the Society of Talking Bird Owners, taught the birds to bark. As a result, a caricature of artificiality was created, which is typical of a contemporary human (and animal) environment. At the crowded art fair, as the artist predicted:
The work will take on a different meaning. People will start talking to birds, the birds will start repeating different words. Their language will fall into parts. In this project, I reflect on Marcel Broodthaers' work 'I say' which involves a living parrot and a voice recording of different people repeating the title phrase.
At the turn of the year 2009, Kurant, together with Anna Baumgart and with the organizational support by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, worked on a project entitled (…). In the exact place where, during the Second World War, a footbridge existed over Chłodna street linking two parts of the ghetto, the artists placed a temporary installation of balloons forming a punctuation mark of an ellipsis (two parenthesis and three dots). This mark is used in texts to indicate a break in a quotation, absence, or understatement. The artists called this project an "anti-monument". As Kurant said:
For many people, this installation may be shocking. But this is an artistic protest against the emptiness in the place of this footbridge. Until this day, nothing has been created in here to remind us of that trauma.
At the same time, the artists wanted to escape from the so-called Holocaust industry. As they explained:
We are interested in the actual monopoly of the memory discourse by the monumental language of a specific, existing alphabet of forms and signs commonly used in the visual language of monuments.
The ellipsis was meant to be "a mark for rent" and to be fulfilled with a different meaning depending on a space where it would be placed. Jörg Heiser wrote:
The work by Kurant and Baumgart is open in its principle: we can easily imagine that its index-like aspect - its ability to visually mark emptiness - may function well in many different contexts, however all of them being marked with the traumatic absence and taboo. (…) It is of an essential meaning that the flexibility of this work does not imply indifference to given contexts (…) - it is rather a rejection of the idea that art relieves the public from the task of addressing these issues, as if they were a kind of imposed ersatz of commemoration.
Architecture Venice Biennale
In 2010, Agnieszka Kurant and an architect, Aleksandra Wasilkowska entered a competition for an exhibition at the Polish pavilion at the Architecture Venice Biennale with a project Wejście/Wyjście / Enter/Exit, which would provide the pavilion into an alternative entrance on the Giardini area. The competition gave rise to critique and controversies. The jury did not decide on any of the submitted projects. Instead, they invited a curator, Elias Restone, who created a second, this time, closed competition, in which he nominated a different project by Kurant and Wasilkowska - Emergency Exit:
[this is] a construction which brings to mind a ski jump reaching almost to the ceiling of the pavilion. There will be a slot at the top into which you jump not knowing what is waiting for you at the bottom because all you see is a layer of clouds underneath.
-- described Kurant in an interview with Dorota Jarecka.
Kurant and Wasilkowska draw on the famous Leap into the Void by Yves Klein in proposing an alternate attempt to "escape from the system". Wasilkowska adds:
This is our disobedience against the system of Architecture Biennale, where mostly utopian visions of cities, plans, or models of projects are shown. We have created an installation in which, after having seen hundreds of projects and plans, one can switch off the intellect and start experiencing.
Ficticious Knowledge, Phantom Capital