Armin Linke & Peter Hanappe, Phenotypes – Limited Forms, 2007, installation. Co-produced by ITYS.

Selective Knowledge explores the diverse ways in which contemporary artists turn both to the recent past and the Internet in order to build up new narratives and comprehend a rapidly changing and information-saturated world together with their own identity and place within it. For its curator and director of the Institute of Contemporary Art and Thought Els Hanappe, artists are not driven by nostalgia or a preoccupation with truth but rather they are concerned with an approach to knowledge that deviates from the overarching homogeneity and systematisation of established truths to foster instead alternative associations and interpretations of the present. At the core of this enterprise, there is a selective process, as praxis of both acceptances and rejections, inclusions and exclusions, highlights and suppressions, that gives it an increasingly subjective character.

No doubt, Hanappe sets up a conceptually challenging show that tackles a range of issues. It is this sort of conceptualism that is at once the strength and the pitfall of the exhibition. Ambitious curatorial questions such as: ‘Are there limits to our knowledge? Is mediated experience fiction or reality? Does artwork truly help the viewers to grasp reality?’, however stimulating, infuse the show with a somewhat ‘academic’ inflection that at times seems to overshadow the works themselves and their effect. This is reinforced by the curatorial association of the presented works with a historical legacy that goes back to the 16th century Cabinets of Curiosity, broadly recognised as the predecessors of the museums and their functions of collecting, displaying and study. Without coming up with a tightly historical show, Hannape nevertheless points out that ‘the exhibition starts chronologically in the dark depths of history’, and endeavours to trace how various knowledge approaches, ranging from the Cabinets of Curiosity and the Renaissance model of knowledge as a means of power, to current engagements with the Internet resonate to contemporary art practice.

The exhibition foregrounds the appropriation as well as the interrogation of archival material and structure in contemporary art, reflecting an increasing involvement with it, aptly identified by Hal Foster as the ‘archival impulse’ or, to use Derrida’s notion, the ‘archive fever’. This current fascination with the archive is suggestive not only of the artists’ need to reflect on the past and re-establish a relationship to the present but also to enrich aesthetic language. Archival returns and appropriations tend to establish a sort of ‘archival aesthetic’ and generate an archival meta-discourse within which Selective Knowledge might be seen.

We are introduced to the show by the video Toute la mémoire du monde / Alles Wissen dieser Welt, 2006, by Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani featuring the French National Library in an eerie silence and emptiness. The slow shots emphasise the work’s concern with the impact of digital technology on the future of libraries and creates a feeling of inertia. It is a curatorial failure, though, that it is displayed in the hallway wherein the street noise and strong light cancel its characteristic lethargic atmosphere. The work calls on the homonymous 1956 documentary film on the same library by Alain Resnais, which is also on view at the exhibition. Resnais’ film is a tribute to the library as the temple of knowledge and the associated practices of compilation, taxonomy and control. An analogous conception of places of knowledge as static repositories, endowed with an awesome mystery, authority and solemnity is seen in the large-scale photographs of empty public libraries by the German photographer Candida Höfer. Höfer — together with Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, all of whom have been Bernd and Hilla Becher’s students — draws upon the Bechers’ detached seriality to develop a seemingly unmediated observation that borders the austerity of documentation.

Standard views of the archive as a site of power and authority are complemented by its notion as an active place of creation, the archive as ‘found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private’, in Foster’s words. The very ambiguity of the archive, its inherent fragmentations and gaps, the multiplicity of narratives it entails beyond its apparent truth and unity make it an extremely fertile territory of exploration and critical enquiry. In Vitrine de reference, 1973, Christian Boltanski brings together a diversity of objects in a museum-like glass cabinet as a reflection on the Holocaust victims, blurring the line between fiction and history, a real archive and an allusion to it. Likewise, Mark Dion’s installation evokes a natural history museum display case that seeks to go beyond the taxonomy of the established museum practices. For George Hadjimichalis the work of art takes the form of the archive itself to highlight the archive’s open structure and potential infinity, whereas for Sarah Seager and Mariana Castillo Deball interrogation takes the form of personal interventions into the archives and libraries themselves.

A range of artists deploy photographic archives and media images as reflexive responses to the past giving them the character of political observation and interpretation — despite their seemingly ‘anti-aesthetic’ approach. Vangelis Vlahos selects images from the Greek newspaper Eleftheros Kosmos to explore the Greek political conceptions of the Balkans and Eastern Europe from the 1960s to the 1980s; Peter Piller presents images of German newspaper clippings and postcards that feature WW1 bombs together with children, Hans-Peter Feldmann (Die Toten 1967-93) employs indistinguishably images of terrorists and their victims in post-war Germany, and Sam Durant turns back to the socio-politically charged context of the ’60s and ’70s to reproduce in pencil the original photos of social protests throughout the US. On the other hand, the Greek Eirene Efstathiou and the Serbian Ivan Grupanov use references to history in search of their personal identity and family history, working in the indeterminate zone between private and public. Issues of selective knowledge, both straightforward and rather suggestive, can be seen in the paintings by Pietro Roccasalva, Albert Oehlen, and Marc O’Kelly, while Apostolos Karastergiou’s drawings of monkeys draw upon the tradition of 19th century travelogues to explore the notion of mediated experience.

Regarding the use of Internet resources, one of the most striking works of the show is the Detail, Homophobishe Variation, 2002, by Henrik Olesen. The artist turns to the Internet to make a psychological portrait of the defendants of a homosexual crime in the US, using the serial presentation of their faces in diminishing size. Central to the exhibition is the installation Phenotype–Limited Forms, 2007, by Armin Linke and Peter Hannape. Here visitors are provided with the opportunity to select images through hundreds of photographs reprinted from Linke’s own collection and create their own booklet following a concept of their choice. The work, the curator argues, evokes affiliations with Internet processes — agging and search engines — yet more to the point it is representative of the so-called ‘Relational art’ and current discussions of the viewer as an active participant, collaborator and co-producer of the work. Despite the artists’ intentions to create the conditions of a participatory and democratised art, the installation evokes a feeling of suppressed interactivity and inertia, stronger to an extent than the silent emptiness of Hofer’s photograph that is on view in the same room.

Selective Knowledge takes up the challenge to show the inadequacy of an epistemic approach and to put forward knowledge as the celebration of individual choice within a conflicting heterogeneity. And yet, the show is rather ambivalent. It is not only that the idea of the freedom of choice within the conditions of contemporary pluralism is in dispute but rather that the show oscillates between the non-hierarchical heterogeneity of the cabinets of curiosity and the usual classification of the big libraries and archives. Despite good curatorial intentions, the exhibition is still dominated by a somewhat all-encompassing attitude, or what Derrida would call a Western impulse for origins and beginnings. In addition, as is often the case with intellectually charged shows, it cannot avoid a risk of perplexity that makes the artistic intention and the thinking behind the work more intriguing than the work itself. Selective Knowledge is an ambitious show, yet it is bound to a restrictive account of knowledge as signification, interpretation and discourse. However, when it comes to knowledge and its association with art, there is always a pre-conceptual dimension — which is of discourse and yet irreducible to it — that the artwork can communicate. A preoccupation with art on the level of concepts tends to put that dimension aside.