Dizziness

Have you ever been dizzy? Were you lightheaded, did you lose the ground under your feet? Did you stumble, crash into someone, perhaps even fall over? Or have you felt dizzy, intoxicated rapture? Perhaps this thought is familiar to you: ‘I don’t understand the world any more!’ This kind of insecurity is also a form of dizziness. Dizziness makes everything different from usual. We are anxious, bewildered. At the same time, dizziness gives us the chance to set off in new directions. For this reason, many artists use dizziness for their work: They engage with the extraordinary, view the world from an unfamiliar perspective, and make connections between things that at first glance have nothing to do with one another.  

To start with, you should immerse yourself in dizziness. Everything is not always as it seems to us: We can be mistaken, disoriented. Our perception is not a hundred per cent reliable, it can be fooled by tricks, misled. Enjoy the sense of doubt!

Whatever it is that you see here depends entirely on you. With every step you make, you will change the picture. Whenever you move, it moves with you.

The famous Perchtenlauf in the Gastein Valley, Salzburg was awarded world heritage status in 2011. Does this mean that violence and fear are an important part of Austrian culture? Is it sometimes good for us to let evil run free?

Cameron Jamie says of his work: ‘The creepiest things in the world are always the things that are considered to be the most “normal”.’  

The dancers are moving ‘as if bitten by a tarantula’. Where does this expression for jerky movements come from? The tarantula is a poisonous spider from southern Italy. A special kind of dance music was developed As a cure for its bite: the tarantella. Frenetic dancing was thought to counter the effect of the poison— while standing still would be fatal. Later, the dance itself was seen as a result of the bite.

For many centuries, lighthouses were essential: Ships relied on them for navigation. Nowadays ships use other methods such as GPS in order to determine their position. Times change, things start to falter. What role does the lighthouse play today?

In the video Lighthouse our view of the structure shakes and sways. We observe it from different angles: From a helicopter, from a boat, from under water.   

Intoxication is also a form of dizziness. We lose control. Trypps #7 shows a particular kind of high induced by the drug LSD. How do people deal with hallucinations, with altered and partly enhanced perception? We watch a young woman in the Badlands National Park as she experiences an LSD trip.

Gradually we realise that our perception is also fooling us: The camera is not filming the woman herself, but rather her reflection in a rotating mirror. The mirror spins faster and faster until we too can no longer see clearly  

When will it all tip over? At any moment everything here could collapse. The same is true of our lives: At any moment everything could suddenly change, we could lose our balance. Light bulbs, tables, socks and wineglasses are defying gravity. But how long can it last?

The photographs are by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. For their film The Way Things Go they used objects to produce a chain reaction.  

Here you see a special balancing act: Three pencils pushed together, held up side by side. It takes a steady hand to maintain enough control. The slightest tremble will send them crashing to the floor.

On the left-hand side we see somewhere calm and quiet, with no distractions, apparently. On the right you see Bruce Nauman’s personal workspace. His workplace environment includes his cat Mr. Rogers, coolly observing the artistic experiment.   

The protagonists of this film project are workers from factories in Thessaloniki, Rome and Milan, who have lost their jobs in the last ten years due to the poor economic situation. And yet these workers have found their own way out of the crisis: They have collectively occupied the factories and used them for flea markets, recycling offices, cafés. As a result, they have carried on earning money and managed to bring some kind of security into their lives again.

A whisper accompanies us throughout the exhibition. It moves through space, appearing time and again. The voice speaks about walking, about knowledge, ignorance. Does it want to unsettle us, to make us stray from our path?

In 2014, Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond began a research project: ‘Dizziness – a resource’. This project brings together artists with scientists, all looking for the answers to questions such as: What is the meaning of artistic activity? And does it need dizziness?