hypothesis is pleased to announce its first exhibition in an evolving series exploring sociocultural themes within contemporary art practice: a platform for artistic hypotheses. Paraphrasing Theodor W. Adorno’s thesis that art is the social antithesis of society, art here becomes the starting point for social questions and is understood as a form of thinking.
For our inaugural exhibition in Berlin, we invited the artist, thinker and performer Rachel Libeskind. Her hypothesis proposes the image as mobile material. At a moment when images overwhelm and are incessantly tagged, sorted, extracted, and circulated, Libeskind tests the instability of the categories that organize them. Her works open image circulation toward different orders, structured through association and intuition.
In the exhibition, which presents a small selection from the artist’s new body of work, Rachel Libeskind brings together, across large-scale works on paper, scanned images of machines, fragments of bodies, tools, symbols, and everyday objects, manipulating them through a range of techniques and material interventions. Printed image, paint, and mark each hold their own place on the surface as the works connect through their shifting scale and unexpected visual relationships. Familiar objects drift toward unexpected associations, inviting a mode of looking guided by intuition as much as recognition.
Most images originate in Reginald Bragonier Jr. and David Fisher’s 1981 What’s What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World. A visual reference book, What’s What isolates objects and their component parts and fixes each within a system of names and labels. Libeskind scans these illustrations, enlarges them, prints them across multiple sheets, patches them together, and intervenes with painting and airbrushing. The original captions disappear, while the fine lines that once connected words to the parts they identified often survive. Their original explanatory function gives way to a graphic one. The language of classification is stripped away, leaving its visual traces embedded in the work. This process extends Libeskind’s longstanding engagement with found imagery, archives, printed matter, and the circulation of images between contexts.
In The Structure of Chaos, the displacement of images operates at every stage: an image leaves the book, changes scale, enters a new surface, and forms relations with images that previously occupied separate pages and categories. The familiar shifts toward associative uncertainty, and meaning travels through visual correspondences rather than fixed definitions. The exhibition’s title names the organizing principle of the works. Chaos describes the mobility of images and the openness of their possible relations. Structure lies in the precision with which Libeskind gathers, enlarges, patches, and arranges them. Moving from the dimensions of the printed page to the scale of the wall, The Structure of Chaos proposes an order built through encounter, where disparate things share a surface and generate meanings that no glossary could prescribe.
Rachel Libeskind is an artist working across collage, performance, and installation. Her visual practice begins with found images drawn from books, archives, and printed ephemera, which she extracts from their original contexts, enlarges, recombines, and sets into new visual relations. Through this process of displacement, images acquire an associative charge that exceeds their original function, gathering into dense constellations where different temporalities and systems of meaning meet. Her work has been exhibited at the Akron Art Museum, Hilliard Art Museum, Jule Collins Smith Museum, Erie Art Museum, Alabama Contemporary Art Center, and Jewish Museum Berlin. Alongside her visual practice, Libeskind develops collaborative performances with Ashbela & Friends, presented at Wiener Festwochen, Berliner Ensemble, Sophiensæle Berlin, Gropius Bau, and Hebbel am Ufer.
hypothesis is an evolving exhibition series that explores sociocultural themes within contemporary art practice: a platform for artistic hypotheses. Paraphrasing Theodor W. Adorno’s thesis that art is the social antithesis of society, art here becomes the starting point for social questions and is understood as a form of thinking.
With hypothesis, we aim to create a different form of public space for art, in which the thesis comes before the market. The exhibitions do not begin with the question Who is the artist? but with the question What hypothesis about our present does this work propose?
Contemporary art has the ability to perceive social developments earlier, more idiosyncratically, and more unexpectedly than many other disciplines. Artists generally do not provide answers, but rather pose questions that make our present visible. We want to open spaces for thought that invite discussion.
hypothesis brings art into dialogue with science, architecture, philosophy, history, and everyday experiences. Each exhibition sparks conversations, texts, and encounters that expand the discourse.
hypothesis has no fixed location. The exhibitions take place wherever their content makes sense. For a short time, each space becomes the starting point for a new conversation.
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