Introduction

From September 13 to November 9, 2008, the Württembergischer Kunstverein is presenting the exhibition “Wild Signals. Artistic Positions between Symptom and Analysis.” The exhibition comprises works by eleven international artists who have appropriated scientific methods in different ways. Historical documents are subjected to a shifted reading. The instruments and discourses of criminology, psychoanalysis, ethnology, natural and parasciences are borrowed as much as questioned. With an attitude that is as critical as it is ironical, the artists confront that production of truth that seeks to master the unknown and the incomprehensible and that rests on the denial of its own fallacies.

Speculation and staging, as techniques intrinsic to scientific thought, its experiments and reasonings, receive special attention – not least because this is the point at which aesthetic and scientific practices intersect. For example, stage, photography and film have long been described as instruments of knowledge, that serve not to prove but rather to actually produce and stage knowledge.

“Wild Signals” presents artistic mis-en-scènes of knowledge – and non-knowledge – in which the performative aspect is manifest. Here, knowledge appears in an open resonant space in which fact and possibility, what may be interpreted and what may not, are mutually conditional. In this context, the exhibition deploys two artistic strategies (and their overlapping): The analysis and simulation of findings, evidence and symptoms.

The exhibition’s title refers to Kevin Schmidt’s video installation of the same name.