ART-PRESENTATION: Limits of Knowing,Part II
The group exhibition “Limits of Knowing“, explores the utmost borders of the rational knowledge. Inspired by the theory of unknowability, the interdisciplinary program invites the audience to float between reason and imagination. States that are less popular in our knowledge-based society, like anticipation, premonition or bewilderment, can serve as a way into artistic, scientific and philosophical issues (Part I).
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Martin-Gropius-Bau Archive
In “Limits of Knowing“ the works attempt to transform ideas into sensory experiences, concepts into “felt” sense and question our perception of reality by using current technical devices such as clothing with sensors, smartphone applications, VR glasses or analogue techniques such as scenography or narrative spaces. The immersive spatial installation “Haptic Field (v2.0)” by Chris Salter + TeZ is a multisensory experience in which touch, sight and listening fuse into a holistic experience. First, the visitors dress in overalls specially designed by JNBY, whose semi-transparent hoods obscure their view, while integrated sensors and vibrating actuators convey intense sensory impressions, a hallucinatory and dreamlike environment is created, in which everything is in motion. The participants are guided through the rooms by the moving vibrations pulsing through the clothes as well as shimmering light and darkness. The visitors’ fixation on the sense of sight becomes secondary, space begins to dissolve and their perception of their own physical boundaries becomes blurred. Mona el Gammal’s 360° movie “RHIZOMAT VR” extends the Narrative Space “RHIZOMAT” built by the artist Mona el Gammal, from physical into digital space. In the world of “RHIZOMAT VR”, the Institut für Methode (IFM), a global private company, has replaced the state and suppresses and monitors people with the promise of security and stability, down to the minutest areas of their life. The underground group Rhizomat, whose members push ahead in research into an alternative social order in individual cells, as well as organising practical resistance, rebels against the totalitarian IFM. Rhizomat has set itself the task of snatching those whose free will has not been completely extinguished from the dictatorial system. The regular mind control tests by the IFM are used by Rhizomat to set up alliances. Between dystopia and utopia, obedience and freedom, a struggle develops for each individual. In the exhibition “Arrival of Time”, Curated by Isabel de Sena are on presentation works by: Rana X. Adhikari, William Basinski, Rainer Kohlberger, Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand. For over 100 years, we have known that time is an animate and inconstant physical quantity. However, this situation changed dramatically on 11/2/16. On this date, an announcement by LIGO Caltech & MIT told the world of the first-ever detection of time-fluctuation, achieved with the help of the most sensitive machine ever to be built by humankind. The exhibition celebrates just that: the arrival of time in its other, more exotic guise – as an outlandishly curvaceous, pliant, and irrepressibly animate component of the universe. Offering experiential approaches to that which we cannot yet grasp, it stages a “Black Hole Theater”, a sensory overload of quantum fluctuations, and invites you to become acquainted with the owner of the most complex perceptual apparatuses in the animal kingdom. For “Rimini Protokoll”, Stefan Kaegi accompanied eight people who, for different reasons, have decided to prepare their farewell. Thus, in collaboration with the set designer Dominic Huber, spaces were created that tell the story of what remains of people when they are no longer there: an EU ambassador documents a foundation that will continue her work in Africa when she is gone. A Zurich-based Muslim organises the repatriation of his body to his hometown of Istanbul. A German banker near the end of his life reflects on the role he played in National Socialism. A researcher into dementia realises that he does not want to live with the disease that he himself has researched his whole life long. A base jumper takes out a term life insurance for his family, so that in case of his death, he will not leave behind a financial mess. And a ninety-year-old employee wonders what story the photographs of her life will tell. For “Unknown Cloud”, the team of Lundahl & Seitl has created an AI smartphone application called “Caretaker” to predict the next appearance of an electromagnetic cloud. Following Caretaker’s instructions, a flashmob will track down and follow its information through the urban landscape of Berlin.
Info: Martin-Gropius-Bau, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Berlin, Duration 1-31/7/17, Days & Hours: Wed-Mon 10:00-19:00, www.berlinerfestspiele.de
