A Partial View: Group Exhibition

In 1911, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell fell into an argument over a rhinoceros. Russell wanted to get Wittgenstein to accept as true at least the apparently self-evident statement that there was no rhinoceros in the room. Wittgenstein refused to concede even that was certain, without further proof. This seemingly absurd incident touches on a question raised time and again in the group exhibition A Partial View: What is the relationship between perception, common sense, and certainty? The exhibition takes as its starting point stories, things, and images whose interrelationships change, depending on the perspective from which they are seen and how they are cropped and framed. Thus, a detail may sometimes bring to our attention a connection we overlooked in the overview; a material trace can suggest something that is no longer present. Or conversely: Something can be undeniably present, although there be no consensus over its legibility. What is visible, what is legible, emerges inter alia from the relationships among things, images, times, and contexts. The exhibition title A Partial View refers to the limitations inherent in any perspective, as Donna Haraway pointed out in developing her concept of partial perspective. Partial can also mean biased or favorable to one side in a debate: But what happens when a perspective loses from sight the fact that it is limited? This question leads, over and above the conditions of perception, to a contemporary experience in which differing perspectives often harden into mutually exclusive certainties. The six artists—Heba Y. Amin, Itamar Gov, Wie-yi T. Lauw, Judith Raum, Aykan Safoğlu and Denys Shantar—draw for their works upon personal memories, historical traditions, and contemporary experiences. They make connections between what is observed and what is presented and explore the boundaries of seeing and bearing witness. Material traces, isolated and blown-up details, as well as the overlapping of images and motifs taken from different contexts lead the viewer to perceive unexpected affinities, and at times dream-like scenes and encounters.

Heba Y. Amin’s video installation Iterations on Witnessing brings together various episodes from an unfolding archive centered around the paradoxes of vision, perception and witnessing. One iteration involves the neurological phenomenon of “blindsight”, a term coined by neuropsychologist Lawrence Weiskrantz to describe patients whose blindness is caused by damage to their visual cortex, yet are still able to react to visual stimuli without consciously perceiving them. First documented in WWI soldiers who suffered gunshot wounds to the head, Amin asks what these soldiers saw that they did not know they were witnessing. Amin’s projection stands in a spatial relationship to sculptural props—architectural fragments, ladders, and industrial building materials. They recall scientific experiments with monkeys navigating obstacle courses despite not being able to see them. From war-blinded soldiers and colonial cartographers to post-colonial ghost towns and the ethics of observing migration and warfare, Amin takes the question of witnessing a step further to the political conditions of seeing. She redirects our gaze to cropped details, shifts our focus and perspectives to what would otherwise be missed when looking at the whole picture.

Wie-yi T. Lauw starts with her Chinese-Indonesian family history and interweaves family traditions with historical contexts. One path leads back to her great-grandfather and his opium addiction, then segues into the Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860. Her larger-than-life ceramic poppy-seed pods glimmer in dark silver and evoke the valuable merchandise to which colonial violence and economic dependencies once clung. In her collages, Lauw draws on botanical archival images of poppy plants, as well as literary references, such as L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), in which a field of poppies sends the travellers into a deep sleep. Alongside these, she incorporates historical photographs taken by Jesuits in China and passed on to the artist via her father. They are material traces of a family history whose connections can only be pieced together in fragments. She also shows the backs of these photographs with their handwritten annotations. The pictures give us an image of people and landscapes; the annotations give them names and context. Who is looking at whom, who names and who is being named? These questions touch on the power relations and conditions under which the photographs were taken. Lauw goes in search of facts, speculates on the possibilities, and leaves the lacunae visible, where it is no longer possible to reconstruct a coherent narrative. Here, Lauw’s work touches on the notion of intimacies in the writing of Lisa Lowe: notably in the often-overlooked connections between the opium trade and Christian missionaries, between economic expansion and colonial power.

Judith Raum shows images, in small format, with gloomy scenes, where nature and man are seen in apocalyptical vulnerability, together with shimmering paintings on silk. The beauty of the color clouds that bleed deeply into one another is superficial: The color tones are taken from press images of the massive forest fires that erupted last summer. Clouds of fire and smoke, discolored skies in yellow, green, and black rush apocalyptic visions from some distant future into the here and now. Judith Raum has stripped the press photos of their informational content and scanned them as it were as clusters of color, which she distributes over the sensitive silk surface liberated of any claim to realistic depiction. The twinkling illumination of the color clouds, so difficult for the eye to grasp, and their borders, frequently displaced as in diplopic images, evoke experiences of impaired vision. The act of seeing becomes a kind of hallucination. This juxtaposition thrusts groups of images that recall older visions of hellfire and Judgment Day, and allegorical elements drawn from the canon of illuminated manuscripts and fresco paintings of the Late Medieval era in Europe, into the present day. The application of color in the works on paper is tentative, exploratory; the personal dimension of the experience of crisis is integrated into the picture via the fractured, direct painterly gesture. 

In his hand-sewn textile collage St. Gall & St. Ioan, Denys Shantar brings together two saints, who in life were separated by centuries and great distances. The saint honored as “John the Russian” was born, according to tradition, around 1690 in the Cossack Hetmanate, in what is now Ukraine. Later, he was sold as a slave and taken to Cappadocia in the Ottoman Empire. His epithet positions him in a national narrative and thus touches on the question of how historical notions of belonging are passed on, claimed, and altered in their significance—a question that takes on renewed urgency in light of the Russian war of aggression against the Ukraine. Just behind and to his side stands Saint Gall, an Irish wandering monk, namesake to the city and Canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland. In Shantar’s collage, the heads of both saints lie very close together. Their bodies are recognizable only in fragments. Faces, hands, and clothing emerge from the patterns in the carpets and fabrics—or are lost in them. A golden crooked staff makes reference to Saint Gall. Between the two figures lies a white cloth, embroidered in red and black, which both are touching with their hands. The fabric recalls Ukrainian ritual cloths, such as are used at weddings or to adorn icons, but it can also be read as a letter or scroll. The composition recalls Egon Schiele’s The Hermits (1912), in which two darkly clad men stand close together, so that their bodies almost merge. In the imagined, possible reading as a queer encounter, the traditional images and associations of the two saints recede into the background. What ties them together reveals itself through their physical proximity and their joint touching of the cloth.

For his installation Satzzeichen (Sachsen) [Punctuations (Saxony)], Aykan Safoğlu sought out various places in Leipzig and used frottage to obtain impressions of their surfaces. He thus recorded traces of reliefs, memorial plaques, and other structures in the form of punctuation marks. These places include the Nikolaikirche, a key site during the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, and the Nikolaisäule [Column], erected in commemoration of these events. An exclamation mark emerged from a memorial inscription, a question mark from the palm-leaf decoration of the Column. Both punctuation marks can be read either as affirming or as questioning images produced to construct a historical narrative. An asterisk derives from what remains of the tympanum frieze on the Neues Theater, which was destroyed in the Second World War. The symbol, when used to mark a footnote, recalls something absent; when used as a gender asterisk (in German), it touches on questions of visibility and belonging. From the bark of a tree in the courtyard of the Nikolaikirche, Safoğlu produced suspension marks, the sign of something incomplete or unsaid. The artist compares the repeated process of rubbing, through which the paper touches the surface of the city, to a long-exposure image: He is gradually capturing an “analogue photograph of the city”. Depending on the light and viewing perspective, the marks may give off a pink glimmer, step into the foreground, or fade out. Like a score of music, they indicate rhythm, emphasis, questions, and pauses. The frottages preserve the material traces of their places of origin, while the punctuation marks enter into a relationship with one another through their linear ordering, leaving plenty of room for imagination and dreams.

Itamar Gov’s photographic series The Rhinoceros in the Room (Growing) revisits the installation The Rhinoceros in the Room. Or: A Tale of Banality and Evil, which the artist created for the medieval church space of the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen in 2026. There, he filled the nave of the former church with a larger-than-life, inflatable rhinoceros. The photographs presented here show how an initially empty textile shell slowly fills with air, grows into a monumental rhinoceros, and occupies more and more space. Gov refers to Hannah Arendt’s 1963 essay Eichmann in Jerusalem and Eugène Ionesco’s play Rhinocéros (1959), in which the inhabitants of a French provincial town are gradually transformed into rhinoceroses. Ionesco’s parable of fascism and conformity shows how people can accustom themselves step by step to a phenomenon they initially perceive as horrifying, eventually justifying and ultimately participating in it. The anecdote about the argument between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell over the rhinoceros in the room also resonates in Gov’s work. The figure of the monumental animal nevertheless remains strangely ambivalent here: It appears both threatening and vulnerable. While its swelling dimensions make us think of a growth, which continues to expand in spite of all warnings, the series of images can also be read in reverse: as a rhinoceros that shrinks in volume to the point where nothing remains of it but an empty shell.

A Partial View turns our gaze to the relationships among things, images, and stories—and to what happens when a consensus on the reading of those relationships grows fractured. The choices we make about the cropping and scale of an image alter the relationships among objects in the image, which we as viewers construct. Nonetheless, what we perceive and recognize also depends on how we come into contact with things, on what experiences we bring with us, and in what context we encounter them.

Image: Heba Y. Amin, Iterations on Witnessing, 2025 (video still).