In an era where artificial intelligence increasingly shapes our world, what distinguishes genuine intelligence from its absence?
Andersson's 10K VIRGIN BRAINS confronts this question through thousands of white plastic containers that occupy Kunsthall Trondheim, mirroring The Brain Collection at the University of Southern Denmark—a repository of over 9,479 ‘virgin’ brains extracted from patients predominantly diagnosed with mental illnesses, but never influenced by pharmaceuticals.
These containers form an eerie labyrinthine installation throughout the Kunsthall's sublevel basement galleries, drawing visitors from the external world into an internal confrontation with themselves through encounters with fragments of brain-based imagery, mostly pulled from the internet. Animated lab gloves also reach into this maze like disembodied hands emerging through walls—spectral appendages that evoke both brain-eating zombies and the grasping hands of neuroses, inhibition, and morality.
Andersson's thinking draws heavily on dualities, reflecting a broader fascination with the relationship between intelligence and stupidity, particularly the exceptional acts of folly performed in pursuit of knowledge. Much of this folly has come from a reading of the brain as a vessel for the mind. A kind of machine that can be tinkered with, fixed or improved. From French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes’ proposal at the start of the Western Enlightenment that the pineal gland in the brain functions as a human command center, or “seat of the soul”, through to current research into neural nets as basis for computer systems and AI technology, science and philosophy have conflated the biological object of the brain with the much less tangible idea of mind in the quest to understand self-awareness. Some theories have been disproved along the way - the pineal gland, for example, has been found to regulate sleep and circadian rhythm through the production of melatonin. But still, in the modern era, theories attempting to explain our inner voice as a guiding hand or divine intervention acting upon the control mechanisms of the brain persist. However, this inner voice isn't a voice at all – it is the internalised expression of actual social forces, some of which have a vested interest in denying any connection between, for example, depression and politics. These same social forces also have a hand in perpetuating an idea of the brain as a material system which can be hacked, tuned-up, improved and deconstructed to save humanity and birth new technology. The research of today is not so far removed from that of the 17th century.
10K VIRGIN BRAINS deconstructs and parodies the supposed objectivity of scientific inquiry into consciousness, the ethics of medical experimentation, and the very nature of life itself. Drawn from a larger documentary work by Andersson, Degenerative Knowledge Production, the exhibition focuses on the brain as a negatable object, in the sense of an accessible and destructible thing, as a way to understand self-awareness. The imagery and the experience presented at Kunsthall Trondheim is a prompt and vessel for a visitor's thinking brain to project onto, identifying oneself with the shifting lump present on the screens or alluded to in the stacked buckets. A brain looking at itself.
10K VIRGIN BRAINS was developed with O-Overgaden in Copenhagen and Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm; and is presented thanks to the support of The Danish Arts Foundation, Norwegian Arts Council, Swedish Arts Council and Sparebank SMN1.
10K VIRGIN BRAINS is curated by Joe Rowley with Adam Kleinman.
Special thanks go to Roy Even Aune, Mandus Ridefelt, Dagmar Moldovanu, Leo Elia, and Birk Horst.