Exhibition: Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis

Exhibition at the Framer Framed Exhibition & Project Space in Amsterdam

From June 22, 2024 to September 29, 2024, the exhibition Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis will take place at the Framer Framed Exhibition & Project Space in Amsterdam. The exhibition was curated by Professor David Garcia and documenta Institute Professor Mi You.

Belief in social progress and scientific rationality is currently at an end, propelling us into the age of radical indeterminacy and incalculable risk. This is a key factor contributing to a general collapse of public trust in the institutions that are supposed to ‘know’.

At a time when populists and demagogues routinely denounce experts and expertise, a movement of interdisciplinary artists has emerged whose work unapologetically foregrounds knowledge, factual analysis and evidence. Spanning different generations – from emerging artists to others who have been active for decades – they have crystalised into a research-driven movement that one of the exhibition’s participating artists, Paolo Cirio, has dubbed ‘Evidentiary Realism’.

Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis includes works based on forensic methods and data analytics, but also goes beyond that to embrace wider forms of multi-visual research. It poses fundamental questions on what it means to know and not know, while being acutely aware of the fragmentation and relativisation of knowledge in a multipolar world.

Central to Really? is the realisation that we are in the midst of a crisis in knowledge and a crisis in politics, which are one and the same thing. The exhibition aims to expand a space of practical reasoning, whereby it recognises that knowledge is not a zero-sum game. As much as we can and should validate facts in the public domain, we also need to learn to navigate when we are not knowing.

Vernissage
Saturday, June 22, 2024, 19:00

Location
Framer Framed
Oranje-Vrijstaatkade 71
1093 KS, Amsterdam

Participating artists
Paolo Cirio
Anna Engelhardt & Mark Cinkevich
Jennifer Gradecki & Derek Curry
Ho Tzu Nyen
Zheng Mahler
RIWAQ
UKRAiNATV

Further information about the exhibition