Kunstverein München proudly presents Theatre of Measurement, a year-long rotating group exhibition staged within the Kunstverein’s Schaufenster am Hofgarten, with works and events also enacted in Kunsteverein’s kino, foyer, and a number of off-site locations. Bringing together disparate artworks within a dynamic structure, the exhibition will present a variety of physical implements that allow for cognitive connections to be made, demonstrating the functionality of abstraction in our world.

The title derives from Michel Serres’ retelling of Thales’ measurement of the height of the great pyramid, which he accomplished by placing a post in the sand and comparing the triangular shadows cast by each. In so doing, Thales invented ‘the notion of a model’, quantifying colossal, distant, and untouchable phenomena by mimicking it at a tangible scale, within the realm of the accessible. Using shadows to compute heights, representation was founded as a detour used to transport information and describe similarities and differences. In order to measure impossible or inaccessible values, the human mind has had to determine them indirectly, leading to the invention of mathematics, a code to transpose and organize, a scale to maintain proportions but also to summarize and reduce form.

Emphasizing shifts in scale and the abstraction of mathematical language—the relationship between language (algebra) and form (geometry)—Theatre of Measurement examines the ways objects and signs can serve as instruments for describing and modelling disparate phenomena. Key to this discussion is a consideration of embodied and subjective forms of measurement and ethno-mathematics, which both contest the professed universality of numbers by demonstrating radically different approaches to counting, ordering, sorting, measuring, and weighing. Standardized units organizing time and space are shown to be contingent, relational, and subjective, systems of language that allow for information and experience to be communicated and compared. Fragments will come to represent enormous relations, tools will operate strategically to make visible the unknown, abstract lines will map physical processes, seemingly stable codes will be transposed and translated to other systems, geometry, architecture, and cartography will be conflated, chaotic developments will coordinate into basic elementary forms, traces of events will symbolize complex experiences, and extensive and vast formations will be reduced to handheld, local, proportions.

For the exhibition, the Munich-based artist Jonas von Ostrowski serves as a “scenographer” to not only accentuate the physical structure of the showcase itself but also to frame and support various objects over the course of the year. The modest scale and isolation of the Schaufenster is utilized as both a physical and symbolic illustration for the abstracted domain of models, which are both real, physical things, yet also markers for phenomena elsewhere. One can regard the showcase as an isolated frame akin to a matrix or a piece of paper within which entities and axioms are described, calculated, and evaluated together. At specific intervals throughout 2017, different artworks and objects will add new variables to the exhibition’s equation, producing a series of combinations and permutations, and each object will relate both to itself and to larger and smaller phenomena elsewhere. The Schaufenster will become something like a stage where a conversation between artists is played out over time, through their objects, pictures, and ideas, visible constantly in the Hofgarten, open to all, and free to the public. This choreographed procession of objects, figures, schemas, and tools will examine the relationships between quality and quantity, theory and practice, abstraction and application. The result is a space for the exchange of different values and the comparison of various orders and standards, a zone of discrete and continuous actions, of similarities and differences, of calculus and analysis, of problems, proportions, variations, transpositions, transformations, dualities, harmonies, and disagreements. While each artist approaches these themes from their own angles and using their own semantics, the whole will be more than the sum of its parts.