Emma Talbot – Seeds Grow in Fertile Ground (Every Thought is an Opening) (2023)

Louisiana Poster with a section of the work, Seeds Grow in Fertile Ground (Every Thought is an Opening), by the English artist, Emma Talbot (b. 1969), published in connection with Louisiana's exhibition in 2023, The Irreplaceable Man , about the conditions of creativity in a time when artificial intelligence raises questions such as 'what is particularly human?' The exhibition explores this with works from more than 60 artists and with the help of science and literature.

The exhibition arose from a concern about structural weaknesses in our modern society – not least in relation to today's children and young people, explains Mathias Ussing Seeberg, curator at Louisiana. In light of technological developments, it has become particularly clear that standardization, efficiency 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 we do. 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 coming up with ideas, 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 significance and thus value for society or for the individual? What is innovation, new thinking, renewal?

The squeezed human being is a central motif in the exhibition. For example, the human being reduced to his functionality in a system, which we see, among other things, in the Japanese Tetsuya Ishida's masterpiece Mebae (The Awakening) from 1998. Here we see boys in a school sitting in straight rows with completely 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 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 gaps and pauses where we used to do nothing. Strong forces – powerful companies that make more money the more we are on – are at play and affect the conditions of creativity.

Whether the works are a kind of statement of the state of affairs 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, attempts to illuminate all of 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 Bertille Bak, Ryan Gander, Emma Talbot, Trevor Paglen, Tavares Strachan, Candice Lin, Josh Kline, Agnieszka Kurant and Pope.L.