The Presence of Absence
An introduction by Franziska Nori
With the exhibition The Presence of Absence, the Frankfurter Kunstverein is continuing its collaboration with the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research for the fourth time. Following Trees of Life (2019), Edmond’s Prehistoric Realm (2020) and Bending the Curve (2023), this exhibition emerges as a joint exploration of fundamental human questions through the lenses of art and natural science. Additionally, for this occasion, we have been able to involve the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt.
Since the beginning of mankind, Homo sapiens have endeavoured to understand their relationship to the world as a structure of meanings. Where do we come from? How do we relate to the other living beings that inhabit the planet with us? How are we part of an infinite universe? Spiritual beliefs and myths, but also scientific observations and the resulting world views change over time and are an expression of how we humans interpret our relationship to the world.
We are increasingly exploring and penetrating the world. We decipher connections, we organise, quantify and name. We have created ever more complex instruments to do this. We find methods, formulate verifiable theorems and establish causalities between cause and effect. Researchers describe the world as it is, both physically and biologically. They use science to formulate terms and concepts and constantly achieve verifiable results. They decode the world and follow methodical procedures that open up immense possibilities for action. In this way, we make the world available to us. But science does not set itself the task of asking about the meaningfulness of life.
And what does art do? Art leads everything back to us. It asks about the meaning of knowledge for us. Artists are concerned with perception, or rather, with the nature of experience itself. How we perceive, visually, linguistically and aesthetically, but also how the experience of life takes place as an existential experience of “being in the world”. And art can transform our relationship with the world through narratives, through images and sounds, through poetry, into an experience of resonance.
Both science and art have their origins in intuition, imagination and conjecture. While scientists have to create evidence, artists can proceed more freely and make associations and imagination the material of their narratives. The meaning of existence and the experience of transcendence can hardly be found in science. We humans have to find them within ourselves. And we often create symbols to do so.
The Presence of Absence highlights matter as a presence into which life imprints itself. Energy and life are potent yet transient. The interplay between life, energy and matter is a central theme of the exhibition.
The exhibition will spatially juxtapose exhibits that translate the abstract concept of the “presence of absence” into an expanded realm of thought from both artistic and scientific perspectives. Works by significant contemporary artists will engage in dialogue with scientific exhibits from geology and astrophysics, including casts from Pompeii, footprints of prehistoric humans from the Laetoli site in present-day Tanzania and replicas of prehistoric cave paintings.
The curatorial narrative explores the astrophysical phenomenon of black holes. Concepts of expansion, time and the infinite cosmos challenge our understanding. Simultaneously, they provoke questions about our identity and origins. Our planet hovers somewhere between the boundless and the eternal. For a fleeting moment, the window of our lives opens, revealing the unique experience of our existence through our bodies, senses and minds. Each exhibit, in its own distinct way, engages with this existential exploration of being and humanity across the dimensions of space and time.
With this exhibition, we also trace the origins of art as a fundamental human desire to express abstract ideas. Why did Homo sapiens, tens of thousands of years ago, carve animal figures and abstract geometric shapes into the walls of deep caves? Why did they create images of things that were understood by others as symbols, serving as a connection to higher, non-manifest, spiritual realms? Why did Homo sapiens, unlike other species, develop a need for transcendence?
One of the countless stories and myths that moved us is recorded by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, written around 77 years AD, shortly before he met his death in the fiery ash rain of Pompeii: the myth of Butades of Sicyon, the Corinthian potter, and his daughter. The story goes like this: the young girl loved a young man who had to leave for a long journey. As the separation approached, the girl drew the outline of her lover’s head against the wall where the light of the fire fell. The father, moved by her plight, filled in this shadow image with colour and made a clay imprint of the outline, which he then fired. According to Pliny’s myth, art arises from the desire to capture the transient and fleeting; to preserve it out of wistfulness and longing, absence and memory, but also out of love and through beauty. This parable is touching because it embodies such fundamental feelings.
The outline, the stone wall and the fire—doesn’t this remind you of the earliest cave paintings and engravings found by palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists on every continent? Were these the origin of art at the dawn of humanity?
The oldest evidence is attributed to the Blombos Cave in South Africa, dating back 140,000 years. With the migrations of Homo sapiens, cave art spread across every continent. Despite such incredibly extended time periods, this early art exhibits similar techniques and motifs. These seem to have been passed down from group to group, from generation to generation, long before the physiological evolution of the larynx and brain suggested the emergence of language and writing.
For tens of thousands of years, humans—early artists—created images of animals, human figures and abstract signs. Did they grapple with the same questions and ideas that modern humans do?
The cave paintings of the San people in South Africa and Botswana, or those from the Magdalenian culture of the Stone Age in Europe, served as a readable visual language for early humans. They depicted the experienced environment while also representing the spiritual cosmos of these ancient people. The stone walls, where humans created their paintings, far from the outside world and deep in the darkness of the earth, were more than just canvases. They were like a skin that separated this world from the other. Negative forms and imprints of human hands have been found in caves on every continent. These suggest the magic of contact, the touch of a hand on the surface of the rock as a gateway to another world. Leaving a handprint may have been part of a sacred act of connection with an invisible beyond—a transcendental experience. It is evidence of the primordial human need and eternal quest for a deeper relationship with a reality beyond the individual.
Awe in the face of nature. The feeling that there is more than we know. The striving to understand, to perceive through both our senses and our minds the eternal structures that reveal the order of everything in this universe and ourselves as part of it.
Since the dawn of humanity, people have gazed at the night sky. “Mathematics is the language in which the book of the universe is written”, said Galileo Galilei. It is a way of assigning meaning to symbols that can then be read and understood by others. Mathematics is a universal language of human thought, and mathematical rules reflect the order found in all natural processes, whether it’s the Fibonacci sequence or Einstein’s equations. This makes mathematics the purest form of expressing universal principles. Music follows precise mathematical structures, the growth of plants, the sequence of tides and every form of existence can be described by mathematical equations. Yet, there remains so much that humanity does not yet understand. Time and again, the power of the human mind will strive to push these boundaries.
What is the origin of all matter on earth and in the infinity of the cosmos? What effects do natural events create that reshape the earth and affect people’s lives with their power? And how do people deal with the existential need to face eternity in their finiteness? What myths and images do they create in order to connect with the spiritual? Is art a way of immortalising oneself in time? The exhibition is dedicated to these questions, which have been driving the human imagination from prehistoric times to the present day. Ever since we humans have existed on earth, we have created stories, symbols and signs to give form to our feelings, thoughts and knowledge, to leave traces in time and perhaps to connect with eternity.
We experience the miracle of reality through the senses of our body. This consists of the elements of exploding stars in space: the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood and the carbon in our cells. In fleeting moments, we connect with eternity and give traces of existence a material form. Art is one way of doing this.
I would like to thank Claudio Parmiggiani, Indigo and Mayo Bucher, the sons of Heidi Bucher, Toni R. Toivonen, Petra Noordkamp, the artists of the Marshmallow Laser Feast collective and Lawrence Malstaf, as well as the institutional lenders, Dr Gabriel Zuchtriegel and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Prof Dr Fabio Martini and Dr Lapo Baglioni of the Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”, the Natural History Museum Vienna, the LWL-Museum of Natural History in Münster, Nicolò Stabile, founder of the initiative Il Cretto è casa mia of the survivors of the earthquake in the town of Gibellina, as well as the photographer Giuseppe Ippolito, the VR creator Alberto Stabile and the writer Giovanna Giordano. I would like to thank the Italian Consulate General for its patronage. I would especially like to thank Prof Dr Andreas Mulch, Director of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, and Prof Dr Luciano Rezzolla from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt for a time of joint thinking and working.
Franziska Nori
Director Frankfurter Kunstverein
