After Hiroshima, after Chernobyl, after Fukushima, it is time, once again, to speak about atoms. However, the title of Gert Jan Kocken’s Spartan yet powerful exhibition teases us with another question: what language shall we use, and how will such a choice temper or frame the conversation? Although the title is borrowed from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, Kocken appears to be interested not only in a review of scientific thought, but moreover, how tangential elements are stratified into the language of written history. Spinning out intricate allusions to split-mentalities and motives with various chains of actions and reactions into the essential structuring device, the artist advances his telling in the exhibition’s centerpiece, Fission (2013). Fittingly, Fission presents two twinned, yet fractured “infospheres” united under a larger glass window. The first are a group of reproduced declassified political dispatches, which justify the American dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, while the second depicts the massive networks, discoveries, and communications required to develop the American, German, and Soviet nuclear programs respectively through the use of linked captions printed directly onto the glass. Although the work takes the appearance of a giant flowchart, the choice of information and its placement …