BIELEFELD.- The group exhibition »In the Event of Suspicion« understands suspicion as a medium allowing both artists and visitors to question aesthetic, political, social, and media-related issues. On view are works by six international contemporary artists who practice methods of observation and analysis, enquiring into forms of composition and matters of representation.

Much, if not everything, can come in for suspicion these days: news coverage, the workings of the media, economic and political developments, questions of sustainability and the conditions and possibilities governing international collaboration. But in order to formulate a strategy of suspicion in the context of art, the understanding of the term has to be broadened. It cannot indicate only the establishing of proof or methods of verifying negative presumptions any more; suspicion denotes, much rather, acting in a positive sense with a goal in mind, an essentially critical and sceptical attitude towards the given and its manifestations. Suspicion, in that sense, is much more than just assuming or speculating.

The exhibition pursues the premise that the artists themselves declare their works as suspect, while they set out from an intimation of suspicion or intend to provoke such a sense in viewers. What they are each in their own way thereby investigating, is the relationship between art and society, between artist and work and between work and viewers. They ask viewers to query the boundaries between truth, reality, and fiction as well as to appreciate the works as opening up for them their own, particular views of the world. With this challenge as its basis, the exhibition invites visitors to become investigators on the track of a direct and critical encounter with art and what it means today.

With contributions by: Michael Fullerton (*1971), Sven Johne (*1976), Johannes Maier (*1971), Falke Pisano (*1978), Clunie Reid (*1971) and Hito Steyerl (*1966) Curators: Wiebke Gronemeyer and Thomas Thiel