Falke Pisano: The value in mathematics—How do we learn? / Dóra Maurer / Kurt Kren: Relative Swingings

Falke Pisano

The value in mathematics—How do we learn?

with Luca Frei & Will Holder 

Badischer Kunstverein is delighted to present The value in mathematics—How do we learn?, an exhibition by the artist Falke Pisano showing her new series of works in Germany for the first time. In addition to a new film produced for Kunstverein, the show will include a sculptural intervention by the Swiss artist Luca Frei, a series of recitals by the British typographer Will Holder as well as a programme of talks about accountability in artistic practice, modes of learning and the challenge of multiplicity. 

Pisano is known for her long-term projects, which she conceives as organised fields of research, production, and reflection. Her installations explore the status of knowledge and learning programmes with the aid of diagrammatic structures and abstract sculptural forms. In her latest series of works The value in mathematics, which is divided in ten parts, Pisano examines the often overlooked relationship between culture and mathematics. Through sculptures, texts, diagrams, and videos, she investigates how Western cultural values, such as progress, rationality, and universality, have influenced the way we have come to think about mathematics. While some of the works in the exhibition question the past and present position of “advanced mathematics,” others investigate the possibility of the existence of multiple forms of mathematics.

In her new film Wonder Lands in Loxbridge (2016) Pisano turns to a specific European episode in the history of “advanced mathematics.” With the help of various texts, such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (1939), the film explores the different reactions to sense and non-sense in an era when the limits and possibilities of mathematics came under scrutiny. 

As a whole The value in mathematics—How do we learn? leads us in steps along the thought process of the artist, who sets out to find an answer to the question “Do there exist multiple mathematics?” and discovers along the way the importance of examining one’s inherited framework of thought. 

Following the exhibition a comprehensive publication will be published in cooperation with The Gallery at REDCAT in Los Angeles/USA and the Contemporary Art Center — La Synagogue de Delme in Delme/France. 

Curated by Anja Casser 

Dóra Maurer / Kurt Kren
Relative Swingings

Creating structures that can be communicated using the material of film has fascinated artists and filmmakers on both sides of the Iron Curtain since the late 1950s. With Dóra Maurer / Kurt Kren. Relative Swingings, Badischer Kunstverein is showing a second part on structural film in which the work of Hungarian artist Dóra Maurer (b. 1937 Budapest) is explored in more depth through additional cinematic and photographic works and juxtaposed with works by the Austrian filmmaker Kurt Kren (b. 1929 in Vienna–d. 1998 in Vienna). 

Kren is, alongside Peter Kubelka, a pioneer of avantgarde and structural film. The exhibition will show a representative selection of films, in which Kren consistently explores the material qualities of the medium while navigating between formalism, actionism, and poetics. 

Dóra Maurer works with a range of different media, such as film, photography, printing, drawing, and painting. Since the 1970s, the artist has created conceptual photographs and structural films in which she analyzes various processes of movement, perception, and variation. Despite a certain subtlety and poetics, her works are based on rigorously calculated structures that refer to geometric-mathematical systems and methodologies. Works of both artists construct idiosyncratic perceptual situations. Instead of presenting narrative illusions, they direct attention to the formal aspects of film.  

Curated by Anja Casser and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás


Programme

Artist talk with Dóra Maurer
September 30, 7pm 

… for single mothers
November 9–11, 7pm
Recitals by Will Holder (typographer, Glasgow) 

“Partial Connections”
November 24–25, 6pm / 7:30pm
Falke Pisano in one-on-one conversations with Sohrab Mohebbi, Jean Matthee, Luca Frei, Karen François


For more information, please visit our website: www.badischer-kunstverein.de