DREAM 1: Genesis
»Why is there really being and not rather nothing?«
Martin Heidegger, 1929
At the beginning of the exhibition lies the fundamental question of metaphysics. GENESIS — DREAM 1 does not attempt to answer this question. Rather, the exhibition invites us to dream creation — in the form of different ways of experiencing and inhabiting reality; ways that can neither be proven nor disproven, but only experienced.
One dream sees the cosmos as an indifferent process of becoming and passing away: a world without comfort, without addressees, without ultimate justification—that disenchanted world described by Max Weber, in which existence no longer creates meaning. The other dream understands the same reality as an animated web of giving and receiving, as a fullness that ceaselessly gives itself away and in which everything is related to everything else.
Both dreams are familiar to us. Sometimes the world appears silent and indifferent, sometimes animated and responsive. At times, these experiences shift not only over the course of a life but within a single day. GENESIS places both dreams side by side without seeking to reconcile them—spaces of experience through which one passes to encounter the same question again and again.
At the heart of the Lovelab, two works respond to each other: Above the invisible altar of gratitude, created by the Colombian shaman Inö, float the butterflies of Lavanya Honeyseeda. The altar is to be understood as a creative, generative stance—a stance of creation, an inexhaustible source of abundance. The butterflies, symbols of transformation, carry this silent gift into the space: gratitude that gains wings.
GENESIS brings together handmade and AI-generated musical, visual, and video works from India, South America, Africa, and Europe — by Lavanya Honeyseeda, Embokazomanga, J.Plankton, Tim Ra, Kasimir, Livi, and Inö.