GROUP EXHIBITION

Sunlight takes 8 minutes to reach the earth, the light on the trees or the pavement outside is from the past. Some people believe that remembering also involves a certain deletion of the memory itself, a gentle erasure, in the way that sunlight gradually effects pigments, making them evermore faint, in the way that a shirt will bleach if left too long in sunlight.

A basement space, underneath, one without windows, seemingly isolated, nevertheless makes us think vividly of the outside world. What is absent becomes present. Extended periods of darkness conjure extravagant images and hallucinations in those that have been subjected to this darkness, almost as if the visual vacuum must be filled. What is in our unconscious mind fills this void.

There are many problems for our understanding of the world, including the so-called hard problem. The philosopher David Chalmers speaks of ‘The hard problem of consciousness’ as being ‘how physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective experience of the mind and of the world.’ ‘It is one of the most familiar facts in the world that we have this subjective experience but is also one of the most mysterious, why is it that these physical processes in the brain should produce subjective experience, why doesn’t it go on in the dark...’¹

Artworks can be seen as a physical manifestation of thought, thought in all its richness, analytical, conscious and unconscious, making ‘real’ those ‘images’ from the darkness.

Sometimes the artist is seeing or observing others, unconscious of this watching, as in the case of Miroslav Tichý. The subjects are caught unawares, in reflection and in their own other than conscious minds, in the unknowability of thought.

Galerie Christian Lethert would like to thank Fergus Feehily and Daniel Lergon for organising this exhibition, the artists Julia Dubsky, Sophie Erlund, Pius Fox, Roman Gysin, Kathrin Sonntag, Mark Swords and the galleries Å+, Berlin; Conrads, Düsseldorf; Delmes & Zander, Köln; Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf; Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin; Pablo’s Birthday, New York; PSM, Berlin.

^{1 Hard Problem of Consciousness-David Chalmers, Serious Science. Published on YouTube, July 5, 2016. David Chalmers is Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at NYU.}