The Conundrum of Imagination

The exhibition project The Conundrum of the Imagination aims at exploring the paradigm exploration and discovery as an empirical system. The project is not about pointing the forefinger at anyone, not about Columbus nor Humboldt nor any of their peers, but rather about humanity's insatiable desire for wealth that goes beyond the proverbial searching for and sharing greener pastures, but rather possessing and depriving others of those pastures. The exhibition will investigate humanity's endless quest for knowledge, but also the tendency to foster certain epistemological systems and suppress others through selection mechanisms. The project will get granular on religion and culture as tools for the crafting of identities within societies, but as weapons for the construction of the other and similarly utensils for suppression. The exhibition will seek at situating the concept of exploration and discovery within a genealogy of academic disciplines, e.g. Anthropology.

*Imagination creates the
situation, and, then, the
situation creates
imagination.

It may, of course,
be the other way around:
Columbus was discovered
by what he found.

James Baldwin, Imagination

The Conundrum of the Imagination will aim at investigating continuities of the notion of exploration from its earliest days into the contemporary. For this, a spotlight will be set on the way exploration of back then is reflected in the exploration today of the moon and other planets beyond the earth. But even more crucially, the project will look at the Internet as a contemporary terrain for exploration, where the same laws of three G’s are applicable. The project will pick up on James Baldwin's question what if the explorers were actually discovered by what they found and not the other way round. The project is about the human psyche and the predicaments that our minds set us up in when the “conundrum of the imagination dictates, discovers, or can dismember what we feel, or what we find,” as is the case with the concept of exploration.

The presented works will be new commissions inspired by the concept of The Conundrum of Imagination and each artist will present an installation and a performance/lecture piece.

Participating artists:
John Akomfrah ~ Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc ~ Jean-Pierre Bekolo ~ Melanie Bonajo ~ Filipa César ~ Cooperativa Cráter Invertido ~ Ines Doujak & John Barker ~ Viron Erol Vert ~ Ho Rui An ~ Marco Montiel-Soto ~ Dineo Seshee Bopape ~ Abraham Oghobase ~ Ahmet Öğüt ~ Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa ~ Pascale Marthine Tayou ~ OPAVIVARÁ!

curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
co-curated by Pauline Doutreluingne