Book Launch: Cognitive Ignorance
In 2020, we sited an expedition, an experiment, a provocation at the India Art Fair, inviting an anonymous fictional collective to inhabit and curate our space of exhibition with the unexpected and the eventful.
Cognitive Ignorance, a special artist project supported by FICA, entailed the coming together of an anonymous ensemble of players and artworks, represented by the mysteriously anonymous WinWin88. It opened to diverse audiences at the Fair, and was an experiment in seeking and recording novel forms of audience participation. The anonymity of the Collective and of the artworks that it displayed generated an affectivity geared towards augmenting the way people interacted with the works themselves, outside of instructional aids and identifiers that are often the usual markers influencing viewership and reception.
To read more about the project, click here.
In 2022, we were very excited to announce an afterlife of the project, taking shape as a publication that unveils the curatorial vision, our participating artists and the larger intentionalities behind our play with anonymity, fictionality and spectatorship.
Our book launch for Cognitive Ignorance opened to a full house at the India International Centre on Thursday, 8 December 2022. Our panelists Soumyabrata Choudhury, Jeebesh Bagchi and Brahma Prakash presented their potent reflections on the project, bringing together a richer, more indulgent yet critical deepening of our enquiries. We are very grateful to them, and to all those who showed up and engaged with our project, finally bringing to a close over two years of deliberations and anonymity.
As part of a larger performative endeavour, the publication marked a point of assimilation for us, collecting and cohering the various tangents that emerged through this process of collaboration between FICA and WinWin88. The design of the book, its format and expanse became points for us to look closely at the translatability of such a durational performance across different registers.
In the spirit of unveiling and undoing, we are now pleased to ‘reveal’ that the project was a curatorial disruption conceptualised by artist Mithu Sen. Additionally, as Cognitive Ignorance was constituted of a vast network of players, performers and participants—all toying with varying degrees of anonymity, fictionality and disruption—we are also thrilled to be sharing the names of the artists who formed critical nodes within the nebulous narrative of WinWin88.
The publication was supported by FICA Advisory Board members Radhika Chopra and Sunita Choraria, and artist Mithu Sen. Edited by Annalisa Mansukhani, the book includes texts by Vidya Shivadas, Sukanya Deb, Mithu Sen, Rosalyn D’Mello and the participating artists. The book was designed by Shambhavi Gairola and Nikhil K C.
We are excited to have had this project occupy such a vibrant afterlife, and we are very thankful to all who made this possible.