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On ‚Uncertain Knowledge‘ by Helene Bosecker

In the solo exhibition, “Uncertain Knowledge”, the artist Jenny Brockmann deals with the handling and the effects of uncertain knowledge in interaction with humans. Whether it is the weather forecast, the forecast of a volcanic eruption or the probabilities of the next earthquake – with the need to maximize our safety, information about these events are transformed into future facts and thus produce the so-called uncertain knowledge.

In the exhibition Brockmann provides a comprehensive insight into her diverse thematic focuses as well as a look at her cross-genre artistic forms of expression.
Her artistic approach focuses on the handling of data – Brockmann analyzes the processes of the survey, their interpretation, their integration into everyday human life and the resulting consequences. To illustrate these investigations, she uses historical, real and self-collected data, which are displayed as objects or drawings. Fragile steel rods, supported by a spring, set off the movement of our soil in the series SEIS: here the East Icelandic basalt acts as a medium of seismographic sculpture and represents the research stay of Brockmann in Iceland as well as its location and contemporary realization. Another series, titled TERR, picks up on these experiences and works with the maximum size of seismographic activity, which gets its implementation in a sound installation with stone emitting sound through its own motion. The displacement of data and objects, of time and space is expressed here. It impresses how handling, use and management of data leads to concrete events and questions these processes.

Probably the most significant work in this exhibition, which bears the name ‚Sundial 20- 17-040-1‘, shows the real-time position of the sun in seven different locations on earth. The functionality of the sun as point light in relation to our sense of time is plausibly demonstrated in this work and symbolizes the empirical distance to human everyday life, which is also a fundamental factor for existence.

The comparison, fusion, and interconnection of natural phenomena with scientific research links the human need for prediction, security, and control. The apparent universal validity of data and facts in the network of transmission, categorization and evaluation generates uncertain knowledge, which in turn leads to uncertain actions. Brockmann allows an insight into this reflection, whereby the abstractions of media and content play a central role. Brockmann’s drawings are reduced to the information materials and do not communicate which data was used in which way. Be it an altimeter in Istanbul or a hand with a pencil on the East Side River – the testimony of critical analysis is always floating on a meta-level above the works of art.