Ivana Franke’s exhibition brings the question of seeing and perception into full view. We live in a world that is ocular-centric. Sight dominates every aspect of our lives. In law, evidence-building is often centred on sight—witnessing is the ability to have seen a crime being committed and/or the perpetrator, outweighing what was heard as proof. Scent on the other hand is not even considered even if victims of assault remember it more vividly than vision. The evidentiary rules and governs our world. Every act must be validated by a readable document.

Those of us with sight rely on it to orientate and to make meaning of the world. Sight is truth. Truth is often controlled by what has been seen and whether another person can confirm it, which turns it into fact. Ocular-centrism is not only the exclusive domain of any particular field. The world creates images. In visual/contemporary arts, images ¹ are created to be viewed in space. Literature in its expanded form also relies on sight. A story told is contingent on the capacity to visualise the storyteller’s narration. The sciences are dependent on lens-based technology to build evidence for their claims or experiments like astrophysicists who use telescopes to collect data and read it to speculate on worlds that we know little of. Western medicine is also another example. As a patient, you are often required to draw an image of what you are feeling which in turn directs your physician’s examination. Anything outside of the matrix of validation falls off to the esoteric, unscientific, and primitive, to put it crudely.

It is no wonder that social media and the internet make use of vision and validation. The ‘like’ button answers the question, did you see what I saw? In 2018 when the Cambridge Analytica ² and Facebook story broke it shook the fixity of truth. It exposed our biases and the construction of truth-making. The story proved that what you see online is a distortion of what exists. However, this only created a distrust of social media platforms and algorithms. It did not question our biases; how strongly held they are and how pliable they make us. The Covid-19 pandemic sent shockwaves across the human world and rocked the absolute trust that we had in the scientific community and some governments. We lived in a completely destabilised world for a good two years—we are still reeling from it. This became a moment for conspiracy theorists to thrive and WhatsApp became a superhighway for this traffic where half-truths circulated as clandestine information.

Ivana Franke’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland provides a moment to recalibrate our habitual ways of seeing and being in the world, opening apertures to other viewpoints. Franke is known for her site-responsive works which question the thresholds of our perception by creating a connection between the viewer’s consciousness and the environment. Her multi-disciplinary work draws on neuroscience, mathematics, optics and architecture, pointing to a wider understanding of artistic practice and its relevance to other disciplines, as well as to the validity of entangled practices.

You enter a dark room. You are completely immersed in it. Your eyes need to adjust to this new environment. You are unsure of your next step. You stop and move slowly. There is a time of uncertainty before you regain your sight. Before you start making meaning based on what you are seeing and what you already know. Before you make quick associations and judgements. It is in these few somewhat negligible seconds that are emptiest from associations. In those seconds while adjusting, you are more alert, you are more aware of the rest of your body in relation to the space, and your place in it. I find this moment to be most productive, the moment where we are not sure—when we are most open. This is a moment of attention. I would like to ask us to hold on to this moment of openness, free from what we already know and open to other possibilities of moving and being in the world.

Seeing and feeling, an internal process is informed by exteriority—how we have been socialised to make meaning. What I see is coloured by my experience, background and socialisation, making a seemingly objective act inextricably biased. On top of that, memory is unstable—your reading of the world often colours how you make meaning of what you remember which in turn changes as your perception shifts.

Twilight. Neither perception nor non-perception poses compelling questions; “Do we only see what we know? What can dislocate us from our comfortable, predefined point of view, and challenge our gaze on the world?”³ And potentially, can we read the world anew if we suspend for a moment our habits and biases?

Ivana Franke’s exhibition inaugurates Kabelo Malatsie’s directorship of the Kunsthalle Bern.

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¹ Image here includes performance and any medium that creates an image even if you complete the work in your mind.

² You can read about it here – https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files

³ From Elena Agudio’s text Retreat into Darkness. Towards a Phenomenology of the Unknown. On Disorientation, Epistemological Rupture, and Non-Knowledge in Ivana Franke’s Retreat into Darkness. Towards a Phenomenology of the Unknown publication