Christian Tomaszewski

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C.T. Jasper (aka Christian Tomaszewski) is a Polish-born, internationally recognized multimedia artist and educator who works with film, video, installation, and printed matter. He divides his life between New York, Philadelphia, and Gdynia. His work often centers around themes of exploitation, disenfranchisement, freedom, disembodiment, appropriation, alienation, and survival. Through a nuanced exploration of migration, class, and identity, Jasper exposes key contradictions within human experience in the West, such as the tensions between exclusion, assimilation, and belonging. Stylistically, Jasper cites experimental documentary film as the medium that allows him to research and tell stories in their most organic and observational forms. His latest films seek to portray people who live on the periphery of Western mainstream culture, though at the heart of his work remains a commitment to rendering authentic connection and true human portraits of his characters.

A Polish émigré, C.T. Jasper grapples with the simultaneous alienation and exploitation one faces as a perceived outsider in the Western cosmopolitan world. Jasper’s art is a visceral outcry against the dehumanizing forces of migration and displacement, against the constant negotiation of identity in a space that insists on categorizing, commodifying, and ultimately erasing the very essence of who one is. Jasper’s creative work is charged with the energy of unspoken stories—of the cultural erasure that comes with trying to survive in a system that demands assimilation and offers nothing but hollow acceptance in return. In his exploration of the precarity of belonging, Jasper exposes the painful reality that being “seen” in the West often comes at the cost of losing yourself—sacrificing pieces of your past, your history, your truth—until you are nothing more than a shadow moving through someone else’s world. This key emotional and critical tension, laid bare in Jasper’s art, offers a stark critique of romanticized visions of the West, a powerful indictment of the exploitation hidden beneath the veneer of cosmopolitan ideals.

Jasper’s work has been exhibited in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean and at numerous institutions across these regions, including: Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; The Sculpture Center, New York City; Performa, New York City, The High Line, New York City; The Bronx Museum, New York City; The Drawing Center, New York City; documenta, Kassel; The Centre Pompidou-Metz, France; The Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; The Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul; Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice; The National Gallery, Prague; Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.

Since 2013, he has primarily collaborated with interdisciplinary artist Joanna Malinowska. In 2015, they represented Poland at the 56th Venice Biennale with the project Halka/Haiti: 18°48’05″N 72°23’01″W. Simultaneously, they developed Relations Disrelations, a two-person survey show at The Museum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland. Additionally, they created projects such as: Bureau of Masks Inventory, The Emperor's Canary - Dedicated to Scott Pruitt, In Savage Society, Jurassic Garden, Who is Afraid of Natasha?, A Morning in 1953 (Messiaen Reversed, Birds Released), and The Domestic Plane, among others. Most recently, Jasper and Malinowska have been working on a documentary tentatively titled Being Cheyenne, and an opera film, We Are All Ukrainians Now. Recent projects Jasper has worked on individually include a documentary about the artist Ilya Kabakov and a multichannel audio and video installation shot underground in different sewage systems around the world.

Jasper’s numerous awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Jerome Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Kosciuszko Foundation, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland, the Polish Film Institute, and the Cornell Council for the Arts. He was an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City, and Artspace in San Antonio. He was also a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome.

As an educator, Jasper fosters a space that encourages students to see filmmaking, new media, sculpture, and visual storytelling as acts of cultural translation—bridging histories, geographies, and identities. By weaving the personal with the political, the ephemeral with the structural, he invites a deeper engagement with the world, where art is not only a reflection of reality but a means to reshape it. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, and previous teaching placements include Princeton University, the School of Visual Arts in NYC, and the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg.

Christian Tomaszewski receives Guggenheim Fellowship | Princeton University news, April 2008