During Programme No. 10, 17 April until 9 May, 2010, exhibition “Cause and Effect” at the Kim? / VKN Gallery. The exhibition is dedicated to the 6th International Symposium of Cognition, Logic and Communication “Formal Semantics and Pragmatics: Discourse, Context, and Models”. The symposium was organized by the Centre for the Cognitive Sciences and Semantics and was shown at the University of Latvia from 23 until 25 April.
One of the fundamental laws of our world is the law of causality. Philosophers have reasoned about causality and its nature for more than two millennia. One event seemingly undeniably creates or influences a new, another, the next one and thus the chain of causality progresses ad infinitum or the Unmoved Mover. However, does the necessary connexion of the events exist in events themselves or only in the viewer’s mind?
The exhibition “Cause and Effect” presented works in various media – Kaspars Groševs’ installation “Dark Mountains and Nymph”, Maija Kurševa’s sculpture “Trap”, Ojārs Pētersons’ “Geņiaļno, no ņe boļeje” (“Genius, But Not More”), Krišs Salmanis’ photography “White Cube”, Evita Vasiļjeva’s “Untitled” and Armands Zelčs’ object “Marija’s Way” –, that ponder about, comment, controvert and play around with the notion of causality. The works doubt whether it is always clear which of the events is the cause and which is the effect; question what happens if the straight line of time is bent to form a circle and thus the consecutive events are no longer consecutive, and meditate upon the idea that one cause could have different effects.