INTRODUCTION


VERSUCH [1] is a journal and exhibition project. 
Each journal and exhibition run parallel to each other. The journal is not a catalogue for the exhibition. The exhibition is not an illustration of the journal. Rather, each of these works attempts to articulate its own premise in light of another. Each journal and exhibition is like a chapter within a possible singular work. Each chapter tries to talk, in its own way, about what cannot or just does not get said, what is too difficult to articulate or too transient to mention, even in passing. 

There is no proven benefit or measurable value in this attempt as such. Equally, there is no determinate area of interest and no concern in any one form or medium as being generally better or worse than any other at achieving this. More than any conceptualisation of these structural elements, what defines VERSUCH is the work, just the work. Against all that succeeds in explaining everything and saying nothing, there is, more than ever, the need for such a stand to be taken. 

[1] "The word Versuch, attempt or essay, in which thought's utopian vision of hitting the bullseye is united with the consciousness of its own fallibility and provisional character, indicates, as do most historically surviving terminologies, something about the form, something to be taken all the more seriously in that it takes place not systematically but rather as a characteristic of an intention groping its way. The essay has to cause the totality to be illuminated in a partial feature, whether the feature be chosen or merely happened upon, without asserting the presence of the totality. It corrects what is contingent and isolated in its insights in that they multiply, confirm, and quantify themselves, whether in the further course of the essay itself or in a mosiaclike relationship to other essays, but not by a process of abstraction that ends in characteristic features derived from them." Adorno, Theodor. 'The Essay as Form'. Notes to Literature, Volume One. Ed., Tiedermann, Rolf, trans., Weber Nicholsen, Shierry (New York, Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 16.