What if the unknown is not a boundary, but a starting point? This premise runs like a thread through the oeuvre of artist Alicja Kwade. With sculptures, photographs, videos and immersive installations, Kwade challenges philosophical and scientific concepts, calling our certainties into question. She exposes how we construct reality through cultural and political conventions, mathematical systems, measuring instruments, and language – models we often assume to be true, neutral and universal, suddenly appear to be far less self-evident.
For millennia, humanity has searched for answers to the fundamental questions of the universe. Yet with each question we believe we have resolved, new ones inevitably arise. Kwade regards these scientific and philosophical uncertainties not as obstacles, but as opportunities. She translates abstract concepts – like time, chance, and gravity – into tangible form, not to offer explanations, but to call them into question. For it is precisely in not knowing that wonder and imagination take root.
In ‘Dusty Die’, Kwade puts your preception to the test, shrouding the senses so that what you see and feel begins to waver. Massive stones appear weightless, mirrors open onto parallel realities, and time loses its direction. Solidity gives way to motion; the familiar becomes strange. You drift through a universe where the usual frameworks of rational thought falter, and the world – and yourself – come into view from shifting perspectives.
The title links Dusty – dust as both a residue of life and a sign of transience, as well as the microscopic material that obscures yet also enables our view of the cosmos – with Die, the dice as a symbol of chance, opportunity, and destiny. Dust can cloud our vision, but without dust particles scattering light, we would not see a blue sky. The dice remind us that the unknown must be embraced: the outcome of a throw is never entirely in our hands.
In this way, the exhibition encompasses the miniscule and the immeasurable, from the tangible here on earth to the unpredictability of the universe. ‘Dusty Die’ is an ode to the unknown and the undiscovered, to hesitation and reflection. Perhaps understanding begins with doubt.
