Louisiana Exhibition poster with excerpt of the work, Mebae (Awakening, 1998), by Japanese artist, Tetsuya Ishida (1973-2005), published in connection with the Louisiana exhibition in 2023, Det Uerstattelige Menneske , about the conditions of creativity in an age where artificial intelligence raises questions such as 'what is particularly human? Ishida's image of the schoolboys in straight rows with identical faces depicts his perception of society's instrumentalization of the child, a formulated critique of capitalism, where the human being is presented precisely as replaceable, as a kind of machine made of meat that can be replaced when it breaks.
The exhibition, The Irreplaceable Man , arose out of a concern about structural flaws in our modern society - not least in relation to today's children and young people, explains Mathias Ussing Seeberg, museum inspector at Louisiana. In light of the technological development, it has become particularly clear, that alignment, streamlining and measurability play a major role in the way we organize ourselves today. This is good news for the computer, which handles predictability better than us. But is it good news for us humans?
Creativity is a central concept in our culture, and it has many meanings. We use it frequently and in very different contexts. Regardless of the context, the concept of creativity has a core of being good at inventing, good at creating something valuable new. Whether someone is creative is therefore also about what we think is valuable. That is, when does something have meaning and thus value for society or for the individual? What is innovation, new thinking, renewal?
The pinched person is a central motif in the exhibition. For example, man, who is reduced to his functionality in a system, which we see, among other things, in Japanese Tetsuya Ishida's masterpiece Mebae (Awakening) from 1998. Here we see boys in a school sitting in straight rows with perfectly identical faces. Some have even been transformed into the microscopes they use in teaching - like instrumentalized children.
Etchings by German Andrea Büttner, three of her so-called Phone Etchings from 2015, trace the movements of the fingers on a phone screen. They are images of what the vast majority of people in our part of the world spend their free moments on. They fill the spaces and breaks where before we did nothing. Strong forces – powerful companies that earn more the more we are at – are at play and influence the conditions of creativity.
Whether the works are a kind of assessment of the state of things or ask questions like "is this really where we want to go?" is up to the viewer. The aim of the exhibition is to create a basis for a conversation about the role of creativity in our society.
This large-scale exhibition, with the help of artists, scientists and writers, tries to illuminate all this in a format that follows in the footsteps of exhibitions such as the Arctic (2013), the Moon (2018) and Mother (2021). Among the more than 60 artists featured in the exhibition are, among others, Bertille Bak, Ryan Gander, Emma Talbot, Trevor Paglen, Tavares Strachan, Candice Lin, Josh Kline, Agnieszka Kurant and Pope.L.
Dimensions: 84.1 x 59.4 cm (A1)
Material: The poster is printed on 130 g coated paper
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Frame: 12 mm
Material: Frame in solid oak and with high-quality acrylic glass.
Handmade in Italy.
Please note that a wooden frame is a natural product, so there may be variations in the structure of the wood.