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February 14, 2018 – Review
Sofia Hultén’s "Here’s the Answer, What’s the Question?"
Aoife Rosenmeyer
![](https://images.e-flux-systems.com/aa_2018_02_01_27_Sofia_Hulten-Installationsansicht.jpg,1600)
I just didn’t get Sofia Hultén’s work Pattern Recognition (2017). Several sets of 12 small perforated metal sheets, like those that hang on workshop walls, are arranged in tidy grids. Each set holds a number of tools or objects, short pieces of chain on one, plastic cutting templates on another, for example. I should have been able to recognize patterns, because the work is inspired by computer scientist Mikhail Bongard’s “Bongard problems,” a series of tests of machine intelligence. But I couldn’t. Eventually—some time later—the obvious dawned on me. I had not to find a pattern within each sheet, or compare each sheet to its neighbor, but identify a pattern occurring in each of a set of six that was not repeated in the opposite six. I had framed the problem incorrectly.
Reframing is an approach that becomes familiar in this survey exhibition, an extended version of which was shown at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham last year. In works dating from 2008 to 2017, Hultén undertakes projects or records actions in which she challenges the logics operating throughout contemporary life and, in particular, surrounding labor and waste. To this end the artist often generates a comprehensible scenario, then undermines the causality …