We announced our presence at India Art Fair 2020 with a special project titled Cognitive Ignorance. The project entailed the coming together of an anonymous ensemble of players and artworks, represented by a fictional collective WinWin88. 

Like our projects in previous years, Cognitive Ignorance, sought active audience participation. The anonymity of the Collective - and of the artworks - was aimed at generating affective encounters with art, augmenting the works in themselves, outside of instructional aids and identifiers that might influence viewership and reception.

Viewers were encouraged to mine an experience of their own, working through their immediate responses to the space(s) and sensations they encountered. They were invited to actively interact with the works on display, reading and responding to prompts and questions placed instead of informational wall-texts that usually accompany artworks in an exhibition space.

By doing so, WinWin88 sought to question and challenge accepted notions of authorship, gender, nationality, language, familiarity, and context that facilitate a viewer’s experience of an artwork. However, the gamified vacuum created by the absence of wall-texts, captions, and artist names urged audiences to stay with their instincts and participate in forming their own environments of affect and understanding.

Imagining the space of the exhibit as an art-laboratory, Cognitive Ignorance created and elicited a re-contextualisation - of systems of perception, information, and agency - within larger discourses around the art market, notions of value, worth and meaning.

Evoking counter-structures of artistic solidarity, WinWin88 conceived of Cognitive Ignorance as an exercise in intellectual humility, inviting both personal and structural relationships to form with the artworks. The project was aimed at activating the space of the exhibition through the medium of response - whether hesitant, instinctual, dismissive, cognitive or inspired.