Entering the exhibition space at Framer Framed in Amsterdam, a visitor is confronted with what appears to be a video production set. Moving from the front of the gallery to the back, or as the exhibition leaflet suggests, from “the stage to the backstage”, a green screen occupies the centre of the gallery, with TVs arranged in various corners. Green lines on the floor form a constellation, connecting one art installation to the other, with phrases such as “weaponising ignorance”, “evidentiary realism”, or “politicising knowledge”, suggesting the themes for the exhibition on view, Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis, co-curated by Mi You, a curator, researcher and academic born in Beijing and David Garcia, an artist and academic from the UK. The spatial design by Barcelona-based graphic designer Ruben Pater is meant to bewilder the visitor through its staging, setting the tone for an exhibition that questions how knowledge (which the curators interpret as scientific evidence, information about current affairs and the like) is produced.

The exhibition, on view from June 23 - September 29, 2024, brings together artists whose works question and criticise the evolving entanglements between knowledge (both production and dissemination) and politics. Through artworks that either blur boundaries between the real and fictional or depend on evidence-based research, the show hopes to provoke discourse on notions such as evidence/knowledge/data, when several channels and opinions for verifying or refuting this information exist.

As the official release states, the artists in the exhibition engage with “a data-savvy ‘investigative aesthetic’ with a powerful ‘aesthetics of resistance’” highlighting the role art can play in a time of knowledge’s crisis. This crisis is traced to the rise of the internet by the curators, a phenomenon that has proven that while data is more accessible than ever, it is also more prone to control and manipulation. For instance, works in the show such as Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich’s Terror Element depict the increasing mobilisation of ‘science’ by populist right-wing groups in sowing doubts about stances on critical issues such as climate change, poverty, race and sexual identity.

Knowledge

This doubt in public organisations that circulate information—such as newspapers and increasingly the internet and social media—borne from their commercialisation builds on the thesis of a previous exhibition organised by Garcia at FF, As If: The Media Artist as Trickster (2017). As If took the notion of ‘Post-truth’—or the circumstances in which emotions shape public opinion over facts, such as popular conspiracy theories like flat earth—as a starting point. Where As If probed the blurring of fiction and reality in public media, Really? hopes to show how this has muddied what reality could mean today. In conversation with STIR, Garcia notes the influence of the earlier art exhibition on his current work, saying, “The origins of this show lie in my attempt to respond to a critique [of the fiction as method approach in As If] and to curate a show in which art as knowledge and research lies at the centre but includes examples (such as [Ho Tzu Nyen’s] The Cloud of Unknowing) that tests the limits of empiricism and data as ways of knowing.”

Tzu Nyen’s The Cloud of Unknowing (2011) is one of the first works a visitor encounters in the gallery space. In the Singapore-based artist’s film installation, eight characters in eight different apartments encounter a cloud, only for it to engulf them at the end. Inducing a feeling of uncertainty, the artist notes that the film references French philosopher Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, where clouds become metaphors for reconciling with what is otherwise unknown. This sensation of suppression of insight in Tzu Nyen’s work is also present in Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich’s Terror Element (2024).

Commissioned by the gallery, the hybrid documentary using archival footage and CGI follows a forensic expert, Nina, as she investigates a series of explosions in Russia in 1999. The narrative of the film reveals previously unknown details of the real investigation that followed and its probable misrepresentation to provide evidence to support a second invasion of Chechnya. The uncertainty of truth in this case and its manipulation by institutions, suggests that traditional methods of knowledge production, especially in dealing with sensitive information as Terror Element’s narrative depicts, run the risk of being compromised. How then do we weigh evidence?

Evidence

Hong Kong-based collective Zheng Mahler’s Bubalus Bubalis 14-40,000hz (2021) is a mixed media installation based on the team’s research on the wild water buffalos of Lantau Island and their relationship to the island’s geography. It outlines how the presence of the bovid population helped transform the island’s landscape from abandoned farmlands to biodiverse wetlands. Consisting of the instruments the collective used for the research and video and sound recordings captured by the research team, the work hopes to foster a multi-species understanding of the landscape that may potentially be destroyed by the Lantau Tomorrow Vision development scheme.

Exploring evidence-based research and how it can highlight relatively unknown knowledge systems, Palestinian organisation RIWAQ Centre for Architectural Conservation presents Verb to BE(2024). The installation presents a combination of photos and videos that depict the organisation’s work in preserving architectural heritage in Palestine. The ‘evidence’ presented here in their political artwork—images of workers trying to revive the region’s traditional practices of the building—focuses on the idea of ‘being’; that is the lived realities and experiences of Indigenous voices. The works hope to present the emancipatory potential of Indigenous ways of ‘being’ by bearing witness to the extraction and disruption of colonial powers that threaten to undo them.

The manipulation of information to conform to certain biases presents an issue to the artists in the exhibition who adopt a ‘new realist’ approach to their work, relying on the extensive visualisation of data analytics. Acknowledging the dissonance between what these artists, identified as evidentiary realists purport to project (an aura of the irrefutable) and the otherwise murky nature of data, Garcia comments, “There is something to be said for a new challenge to the ways in which the new right has appropriated post-modernist relativisation resulting in a Trumpian position that the truth is what the strong man says it is. It should be possible to speak truth to power whilst remembering that truth is always difficult as it’s a moving target.”

Data

A neon safety vest with PRESS printed on it hangs from the centre of the gallery; part of GREEN DEAL (2022 - ongoing), an installation by the glocal network UKRAiNATV. The interactive installation is a constantly morphing, in-production project which they classify with the slogans #HOPECORE, #STREAMART and #GREENDEAL. The project includes an installation of works produced by different artists, a live stream and part workshops and live events. Through the project, UKRAiNATV aims to decentralise the production of knowledge, orienting it towards the community through online systems. In this way, it can generate what it hopes is a condition of “hybrid togetherness between people, machines, avatars, signals and data”. By positioning people alongside the green screen onto which images are projected, the work creates an absurd collage of situated knowledge.

Similarly, in what could be termed a community and open source-based acquisition of data, artist Paolo Cirio’s works—sitting between data art and activism—Climate History (2024) and Climate Legal Evidence (2021) present prints and graphs that depict historical events illustrating how the representation of climate change is influenced by political and economic activity. Further calling into question data collection and interpretation, Jennifer Gradecki and Derek Curry’s Boogaloo Bias (2021 - ongoing) looks at surveillance systems through a research project in the form of an interactive installation. Visitors in the gallery find themselves on a video screen, with their likeness scanned as if for criminal matches; the technology here is trained to recognise actors from the 1984 film Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. By highlighting the somewhat absurd but frankly alarming aspects of automated decision-making and bias in such digital technology, it considers the perils of unregulated surveillance technology.

Each of the artists in the exhibition questions otherwise established notions of knowledge and its production by demonstrating the dangerous inclinations power has towards controlling knowledge. They question not only how data is produced, reproduced, disseminated—but also—in this sense, weaponised. Apart from the seven installations, Pater has created collages—one conflating Kant and Trump and another Descartes and Putin. Read quite plainly, these draw a line from the championing of knowledge and science by proponents of the Enlightenment to the cult of personality enjoyed by politicians such as Trump and how they manipulate public opinion.

Existing in the domain of a public art gallery, the curators hope the works encourage a feeling of liberation that comes from the uncertainty of truth as much as from complete knowledge of a circumstance. Acknowledging this and speaking about the larger goal of the show, Garcia notes, “In a way, the show’s selection of various ways of knowing emphasises that the ideal of impartiality is not the same as neutrality. It rejects the idea that the truth is always somewhere in the middle, ‘on the one hand this and on the other that’. Truth and politics can often be legitimately partisan. Ambivalence in the face of rival truth claims plays an important role in preventing the slide towards hyper-partisan violence as a default setting.”

'Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis' will be on view at Framer Framed, Amsterdam from June 23 - September 29, 2024.