Sofia Hultén: Here’s the Answer, What’s the Question?

As its first exhibition of 2018, Museum Tinguely is showing sculptures, installations and videos by the Berlin-based artist Sofia Hultén (born 1972 in Stockholm). Hultén’s works start with found objects—unremarkable everyday items or materials from the world of DIY stores and workshops. Via a series of manipulations that sometimes verge on the absurd, she examines these things that are marked by their previous lives, intervening in their processes of decay or reworking them into new arrangements. The striking titles of her works allude to concepts from philosophy and quantum physics, and to motifs from science fiction and pop culture. As a result, they stand in surprising and often humorous contrast to the prosaic appearance of her materials and filmed situations. With their feel for the magnificence of the easily overlooked, Hultén’s works heighten our awareness of the degree to which our experience of time and reality is tied to the objects that surround us.

Here’s the Answer, What’s the Question? refers to Hulténs new series “Pattern Recognition” (2017) in which she engages with the 1967 publication of that name by the Russian computer scientist Mikhail Bongard. On perforated sheet metal used to hang tools in workshops, the artist arranges found tools to create diagrams developed by Bongard as benchmarks for intelligent machines. According to Bongard, a future system capable of autonomously identifying the opposites represented by these diagrams (empty/full, symmetrical/non-symmetrical, etc.) would have displayed a human capacity for pattern recognition and method development. Presented with an answer, we as viewers are called upon to search for the question on which each arrangement is based.

The exhibition at Museum Tinguely was curated by Lisa Anette Ahlers and produced in partnership with IKON Gallery, Birmingham. The two institutions have published a catalogue with a foreword by Jonathan Watkins and Roland Wetzel and texts by Lisa Anette Ahlers, Chris Sharp, James Langdon and Sofia Hultén. Sofia Hultén. Here’s the Answer, What’s the Question?, Birmingham/Basel 2017, English/German. ISBN: 978-1-911155-12-6.