The Edge of Reason, co-curated and Ben Judd and Sidsel Christensen at KINOKINO, Sandnes, Norway, explored notions of authenticity and belief by inviting the viewer to have a first-hand experience of a world beyond the senses.

Judd and Christensen invited artists whose work helps to trace a historical overlapping in the development of the empirical and scientific with the irrational and mystical. The artists in The Edge of Reason present a duality of experience, by moving in-between a sceptical enquiry and a more internalised visionary engagement to explore the unknown.

The artists, and perhaps in turn the viewer, adopts the role of the mystic, the seer; a romantic position that allows him or her to explore grey areas, to raise doubt, to see visions that we can’t see. This process is a ‘letting go’ into an area that stretches beyond common understanding, as well as engaging in a more systematic mapping of the unknown.

The Edge of Reason, then, is an attempt to describe the invisible. Via a supposedly rational system of understanding, the viewer is allowed to have an experience with the authority of authenticity; however the nature of this experience isn’t quantified or defined. It is still up to the viewer to decide, or allow, it to happen.

The historical and contemporary artworks included draw on traditions of expressing the immaterial through abstraction, symbolism and other forms of representation. But the works also still exist in an open space that is yet to be fully explored or described, holding the potential of becoming more than illustration, but a space of direct experience and transformation. Perhaps in a state of doubt, the viewer is left hovering between different positions, of scepticism and belief, comprehension and confusion, both immersed in a new experience, and also cautious about its validity.

Download the catalogue here.