Kunstverein Hamburg presents A World of Wild Doubt, an exhibition on view until April 14, 2013.
The exhibition A World of Wild Doubt on the ground floor of the Kunstverein Hamburg combines different works from more than 40 international artists in a very special sculptural display. The starting point of the exhibition is the novel The Man Who Was Thursday by British poet G. K. Chesterton from 1908. This mysterious crime story about a seven-headed anarchist council, which actually consists of spies from the London secret police, addresses a world in a permanent state of emergency. Yet in the end, the real danger emanates from artists and intellectuals. The text weaves an unsettling web out of surveillance and anxieties, takes unexpected metaphysical turns and ends in utter chaos. Nothing less than the question of what constitutes genuine anarchy is negotiated. Are the policemen who defend law and order the real anarchists? Is the law necessarily based on the act of its transgression? However, A World of Wild Doubt is not so much an exhibition about The Man Who Was Thursday as it is a curatorial experiment with the novel. Visitors embark on a journey full of associations, historical and contemporary references, ambiguous moods as well as grotesque situations. For this purpose two artists build and design spaces that deal critically with scenographical architecture. The atmospheres conjured up in the book, ranging from discomfort to paranoia, resonate in many ways with the present. Some works are made especially for A World of Wild Doubt; other positions confirm the worst forebodings or formulate alternatives. Additionally, the so-called Wonderwall assembles diverse materials such as early anarchist pamphlets, punk records, books, comics, printed graphic works, and ephemera. (Curated by Dorothee Böhm, Petra Lange-Berndt, Michael Liebelt and Dietmar Rübel.)
The Kunstverein is funded by Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg – Ministry of Culture. The exhibition A World of Wild Doubt is funded by Liebelt-Stiftung, Hamburg.
Der Kunstverein, since 1817.
Klosterwall 23
20095 Hamburg
www.kunstverein.de