FRANKFURT.- “What are you thinking?” It’s a question that seems simple—casual, even—one we’ve all heard and likely asked. It catches us mid-thought, before intention has formed and language has settled. And while it gestures toward openness, it carries an implicit assumption: that every thought should be made legible, shareable, and above all, purposeful. This demand reflects a broader condition of our time: a growing imperative for self-disclosure.
The exhibition What Are You Thinking draws on Susan Sontag’s seminal essay Against Interpretation (1964), which challenges the compulsion to impose meaning on artworks—to turn materials into metaphors and gestures into arguments. Sontag argued that the act of interpretation, when overemphasized, strips art of its immediacy and sensual impact, urging us instead to recover our senses—to encounter artworks as they are: dense and ambiguous.
Spanning the two galleries of Portikus, the show brings together works by Pablo Accinelli (b. 1983, Argentina), Jason Dodge (b. 1969, US), Florence Jung (France), Laura Lamiel (b. 1943, France), Lucia Nogueira (1950–1998, Brazil), Laurie Parsons (b. 1959, US), and Bill Walton (1931–2010, US)—artists who, across generations and geographies, share a commitment to resisting interpretive capture. While some works may appear minimal, others might quietly slip past our attention: a photograph affixed to the back of a refrigerator turned toward the wall, rusted cans placed on a pile of driftwood, paperclips and padlocks suspended from the ceiling, a series of woven baskets on the floor. Over the course of eighteen weeks, What Are You Thinking unfolds as a temporal composition: works appear, disappear, and occasionally reappear, allowing the exhibition to shift and evolve continuously. Rather than presenting a single, fixed proposition, it offers a succession of encounters—preserving space for doubt, for unfinished thoughts, and for forms to remain elusive and unresolved. As artworks change in proximity and relation, new constellations and perceptions emerge. There are no messages to be decoded—only invitations to dwell in ambiguity.
Presented without a question mark, the title of the exhibition is borrowed from a work by Lutz Bacher (1943–2019, US), who exhibited at Portikus in 2013—a tribute to the artist’s resistance to interpretation. In a cultural climate increasingly governed by legibility and justification, opacity remains a political gesture. Refusal—of explanation, participation, or productivity—can function as a form of critique.
What Are You Thinking is accompanied by a free publication developed in collaboration with the artists and their estates, extending the exhibition’s form of open-endedness into print. Comprising artists’ writings, poetic fragments, and historical texts, the material does not offer closure but hopefully ongoing reflections.
What Are You Thinking is made possible by major support from Hessische Kulturstiftung, Georg und Franziska Speyer’sche Hochschulstiftung, Kulturamt der Stadt Frankfurt, the Danish Arts Foundation, and Städelschule Portikus e.V..
Curated by Liberty Adrien and Carina Bukuts.
