Why Do You Give Me No Answer?

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

s-l-i-c-e presents Why Do You Give Me No Answer? an exhibition which brings together works by 10 artists based in Germany, France, the USA and the UK. The exhibition title is taken from a passage in R.D Laing’s The Divided Self, in which a young man (a patient) was forced to argue with his doctor in order to preserve his own identity. Through the inquiry, the doctor’s questions were increasingly met with obstinate questions from the patient, leading to a Kafkaesque impasse in which neither understood the other, clouded by judgements and preconceptions. There are implicit hierachies involved in the judgements, statements, open-ended questions etc., that are part of the production and exhibition of art. They can be destructive at times, flattening or dispelling works and individuals in glances. But there is also a fecundity maintained in the kind of mise en abyme of questioning, in which endless images within images call into question the countless others of which they are a part. It is a type of questioning that creates and undoes certainty over time, unearthing and burying things in the symbolism, the sub-plots, the instinctual acts, and the rawness of works. It allows pieces to be absurd, fictitious, or hallucinatory; to show psychological or emotional content or to be present in quiet observations. Why Do You Give Me No Answer? recognises such layers, shown within the intimacy, honesty, and idiosyncratic vitality between maker and artwork.