"The exhibition begins where Meessen’s research for this project first began: an investigation of experiments carried out by the French psychologist André Ombredane in the Belgian Congo. Meessen came across films from the 1950s documenting Ombredane’s experiments carried out in the Congo, including some intended to test “the mental level of black folk.” Taking these films and the questions they raise as his starting point, he developed a larger inquiry into the role of abstraction in the development of both Modernism and colonial history. The title Patterns for (Re)cognition obliquely references the tests that measure the brain’s capacity to identify and memorize abstract shapes, hinting that the operation of recognition (by whom, for whom, and according to whose criteria?) needs to be questioned."
Patterns for (Re)cognition -- Vincent Meessen / Thela Tendu // via Contemporary Art Daily