GROUP EXHIBITION

What possibilities emerge when we see knowledge, which is presumably fixed, as something growing? The title of the exhibition, Knowledge Is a Garden, derives from an African proverb: “Knowledge is like a garden: if it’s not cultivated, it cannot be harvested.”

Taking this saying as his starting point, Uriel Orlow unpacks the question of what a garden of knowledge could be and what this cultivation and growth means. In keeping with his interests, the artist sets up a dialogue between his own works and those of the museum collection, which for their part raise questions around the production of knowledge. This selection is expanded by loans—artists from parts of the Global South, who expand the previous geographical focus of the collection on Europe, USA and Latin America, and who engage with suppressed history and traditional knowledge in their artistic practice.

Knowledge Is a Garden is an artistic engagement with the repression of knowledge, the unjust appropriation of the same, and ultimately with new forms of producing and varying knowledge. Knowledge does not consist of neutral facts and information—and is never all-encompassing. Rather, it is always located, historical, and, above all, contested and vulnerable. The question of who gets to speak and whose voice is silenced is as urgent as ever—and marked by global inequality. The three loose thematic threads of the exhibition open up illustrative spaces for conceptualisation: the concern is with the entanglement of knowledge and language, and their loss; with the acquisition of knowledge and exploitation of raw materials in the Global South by countries of the Global North; and with wilfully not wanting to know and consciously looking away. Both Uriel Orlow’s own works and the pieces in the museum’s collection and loans can be related to one or several of these broader themes.

Curatded by Uriel Orlow and Nadia Schneider Willen; Curatorial Assistant: Louisa Behr