For Want of
20 February - 18 March 2026
18 - 20.30
Performance 20.00

Elisa Bergmann
Ludovica Carbotta
Stine Deja
Lukas Danys
Jim Hobbs
Patrick Adam Jones
Sarah McNulty

Opening concert with Steffen Levring & Ojon

For Want Of brings together artists who explore the problematic and poetic use of systems and measurement. Whereas measurement often focuses on quantitative results, the artists instead choose a metaphysical approach to exploit the corporeal use of measuring apparatus as a vehicle for critique. Here, alternative tools are used to point out the futility, absurdity and impossibility of truly knowing the world around us; investigating rather through human relationships to the measurement of time, perspective, location and memory.

The exhibition is the fifth iteration of an international project conceived by Jim Hobbs and Patrick Adam Jones in London 2022. Here the selected artists’ work unfolds forms and applications of measurement by investigating relationships between individuals and built environments, both concrete and fictive, and how we measure or understand spaces that are in constant flux or renegotiation. Some suggest registrations of a place, space or situation, that is perhaps fleeting and dissolving through recollection, whereas others will open up concepts and perceptions that cannot be measured formally. There are envisioned futures and various realities, as well as the ideas in response to technological shifts, and storing unknowable quantities, digitally or physically.


Thanks to support from Fake Foundation, Autonomous Province of Bolzano/Bozen - South Tyrol & University of Greenwich



Ring ding ding daa baa
Baa aramba baa bom baa barooumba
Wh-wha-what's going on-on?
Ding, ding
When exactly did we stop thinking in numbers and begun thinking in ciphers?

Ding, ding
Bem bem!

Ring ding ding ding ding ding
Ring ding ding ding bem bem bem
Ring ding ding ding ding ding
Ring ding ding ding baa baa
Ring ding ding ding ding ding
Ring ding ding ding bem bem bem
Ring ding ding ding ding ding
Language can be used as an instrument of rationalization and control, following the same Enlightenment logic that
had enabled war, nationalism, and technocratic violence.
Breakdown!

Ding ding
Br-br-break it, br-break it
Dum dum dumda dum dum dum
Dum dum dumda dum dum dum
Dum dum dumda dum dum dum
Bem, bem!
Dum dum dumda dum dum dum
Dum dum dumda dum dum dum
Dum dum dumda dum dum dum
Non-sense foregrounds the unmeasurable. We recognize it, but can’t count on it. It funcions as an event addressing corporeality and contingency. It’s sound before it learned to behave.

A ram me am brem da
Am da rem ram am da baabeeeaaaaaaa!
Ding, ding
Then iron woke cities with smoke in their lungs
And clocks taught the young what birds had sung.
Time broke into hours we had to repeat
24/7 now setting the beat.

Ding, ding
Da, da

Ring ding ding ding ding ding
Ring ding ding ding bem bem bem
Ring ding ding ding ding ding
Ring ding ding ding baa baa
Ring ding ding ding ding ding
Ring ding ding ding bem bem bem
Ring ding ding ding ding ding
Unsure whether it’s the hand or the eye that makes us most human — perhaps a combination of both. I remember when my child discovered that the tiny hand flickering in front of his eyes was actually his own. What an astonishment! Attach a hand to any shape and the eye will read: “human”. News from yesterday: a hand stencil made on a cave wall in Indonesia about 67,800 years ago is the oldest rock art ever discovered. What an astonishment!

Ding, ding
Br-br-break it, br-break it
Dum dum dumda dum dum dum
Dum dum dumda dum dum dum
Dum dum dumda dum dum dum
Bem, bem!
Dum dum dumda dum dum dum
Dum dum dumda dum dum dum
Dum dum dumda dum dum dum
Don’t be afraid to say the F-Word when you see one. No, I don’t mean FUCK, I mean the other one. A fascist can be empirically assessed, just as all other things on this Earth, by 14 criteria more precisely. Trump meets all of them.

Bem, bem!

- Paola Paleari, Thursday 22 January, 2026, 11.11 AM CET, Lat: 55.690025 Long: 12.562972