Thinking is Seeing

The project investigates how the exchange between art, the curatorial gesture, and the public happens in the context of Constellations, Tate Liverpool’s curatorial initiative for displaying works in the Tate collection. To identify constellations or patterns in the stars has been a way of making sense of the heavens but also a way of orientation for one’s life and experience of the world. Be it about stars or works of art, this very process of recognising connections, categorising objects, drawing inferences—in other words thinking—amounts to, in the words of Leo Strauss, “seeing something noticeable, which makes you see something you weren’t noticing, which makes you see something that isn’t even visible”.

Given the philosophical origins of ‘constellations’ in the works of Benjamin and Adorno, the research deploys philosophy both as theoretical discourse and as practice of reflective inquiry in order to show how this mode of display influences audiences’ experience and understanding of Constellations and their bearings on our life.