How do media and measurement technologies influence our perception of the world and our relationship to it?

The exhibition Terra Incognita will attempt to answer this question through film essays and gallery installations. In doing so, it will highlight the processes that, in the long term, link the depiction of the Earth with its understanding as a resource intended for extraction and conversion into capital. At the same time, it will point out that media and measuring devices themselves are dependent on the extraction of raw materials, as they contain various minerals and precious metals.

The first part of the exhibition will focus on power-driven and historically determinative ways of perceiving reality. How we depict, name, or measure the world influences how we think about it. This section will demonstrate that even seemingly objective systems, such as scientific units or methods of measurement, are not neutral but arose within a specific historical and power-based context. Through the lens of the video essay by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, for example, we will examine a computational error that remains embedded to this day in the European standard of measurement—the meter. Using the installation by Agustina Woodgate, we will then subject the basic unit of matter—the single electron—to the same controversies.

The second part will present projects that give space to objects and materials that we normally do not address or see when using imaging technologies. To this end, it transforms the processes of recording, storing, and reading information into performative events. The exhibition highlights this issue, for example, through the installation by Ioana Vreme Moser, which focuses on the relationship between the recording of information in microchip circuits and its gradual degradation. A similar connection between recording technology and the surrounding environment is also revealed in the video essay by Susan Schuppli, which observes the behavior of a camera chip under Arctic winter conditions.

The exhibition’s concept is based on the term “terra incognita,” which Europeans have used for centuries to designate unknown territories on maps—the so-called “blank spots.” They automatically viewed these areas from a distance, as territories that needed not only to be explored and described, but subsequently also occupied and exploited for their resources. This now-obsolete cartographic concept will be imbued with new meaning right here in the gallery—a meaning that defies the logic of conquest. Through individual works of art, the exhibition will reevaluate the distance that imaging technologies have provided us from the world and remind us that we are dependent on natural resources and bear a certain responsibility toward the planet.

Artists: David Blandy, Kryštof Brůha, Harun Farocki, Su Yu Hsin, Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner, Ioana Vreme Moser, Bára Mrázková & Karolína Žižková, Susan Schuppli, Selmeci Kocka Jusko, Agustina Woodgate

Curator: Martin Netočný

Graphic design: Zuzana Burgrová

Architectural design: Kateřina Radakulan