Jonas Dahlberg (b. 1970), who is based in Stockholm, and Ján Mancuska (b. 1972), who lives in Prague and Berlin, have engaged in an artistic dialogue with the architecture of the Kunst Halle. Their collaborative project subverts customary viewing habits and activates language.
How we understand things always depends on our point of view. Jonas Dahlberg uses film to plot the viewer’s position in space, while Ján Mancuska addresses our linguistic attitudes to space. In their joint work at the Kunst Halle, images, language and space interact, deconstructing cognitive processes and making them perceptible in spatial terms.
Dahlberg and Mancuska’s work blurs conventional distinctions between sensory and linguistic perception. The artists make us realise that sensory perception of space is always accompanied by a process of linguistic cognition. Their two perceptual approaches – spatial (Dahlberg) and linguistic (Mancuska) – meet in the viewer’s standpoint.