Degenerative Knowledge Production

“In 2023, my mother convinced me that intelligence is a purely random, local interaction and that the scientific phenomenon simply does not exist.” It is not often that artists set out to battle with the ruling powers of intelligence, but this is nevertheless the case for the first grand-scale solo exhibition by visual artist Madeleine Andersson, quoted above. For O—Overgaden, Andersson uncovers stupidity and absurdity as inherent to the systemic, scientific understandings of the brain and body—via a sped-up, research-led story of moving images and sculptural gestures. Andersson’s major new film piece, Degenerative Knowledge Production , centers on electricity’s use as a metaphor and means to optimize, control, and classify the human brain as dumb, intelligent, or dead. The 75-minute film brews together punkish grainy images found trawling YouTube, popular feature films, and old documentaries. Against this audiovisual setting, an AI voiceover recounts how the history of electric brain experiments supports what Andersson coins the “cogiocracy”—the hegemonic rule of both the cognitive and cogito (thinking) or, plainly, how today’s society could be said to be controlled not by the people’s democracy but by rulers of the mind : the cogiocracy. From early 18th-century electrical experiments (notably, German scientist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, who induced sexual arousal by electrically wiring his genitals), Victorian electromedicine, and 19th-century electroshock therapy, through to today’s AI brain, Andersson paves an unorthodox and shocking route into how electricity has been a hit-or-miss tool in manipulating our understanding of the human mind. A case in point: Andersson’s film reveals how scientific and societal developments repeatedly turn out to be entirely dependent on flat-out stupid experiments; a trail of errors often ignored by the typical historical accounts. If the “major history” of the systemic rule of the mind (the cogiocracy) is told in Andersson’s feature-length film, another film piece, Me, ordering a mind control spell off Etsy to be cast on myself , results from the “minor history” of Andersson purchasing an esoteric “personalized” video of a liberating mind spell in defiance of (cogiocratic) “mind control”. Equally defiant is a wall of buckets, creating an obstructive architecture formed by 1:1-scale replicas of the plastic containers in the world’s largest store of preserved brain samples, a Danish collection today located at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) in Odense. From the wall of buckets, odd occasional hair growth is escaping the autopsied, archived systematization. Another absurdist sculptural series combines the morbid shapes of 17th-century “mortsafes”—iron structures to prevent grave robbers from stealing corpses for use in scientific experiments—and benign Scandinavian wood carvings used in children’s furniture. Meanwhile a slapstick sculpture of black attaché cases held by disembodied hands seems to testify to the disconnected nature of modern systemic, rationalized work. Ripping apart rational or “clever” optimization in surrealist combinations of inherently foreign things, the exhibition jests with the ivory tower of knowledge production and its progression. It is an invitation to understanding intelligence and stupidity as codependent—calling for degenerative, erratic, humorous, flawed, creative, psychedelic, and stupid plasticity as a part of the human tissue. Madeleine Andersson (b. 1993, SE) is a graduate of the Royal Danish Art Academy (2022) and lives and works in Copenhagen. Andersson has previously exhibited at venues including Färgfabriken, Stockholm (2023): Bærum Kunsthal (2022); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022); Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2019, 2020); Accelerator, Stockholm (2019); and S.M.A.K, Ghent (2019). The exhibition Degenerative Knowledge Production marks the culmination of Andersson’s participation in O—Overgaden’s one-year postgraduate program, INTRO, supported generously by the Louis-Hansen Foundation.