0.7 COUNTER CAUSALITIES

Date2025

CurationRohit Jain

Format Research Archive, Public Program, Group Exhibtion

Exhibition 28.11.–30.11.2025
Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland

TalkHabteab Yemane
Nicole Stolze (SwissAid)
Marc Ummel (SwissAid)
moderated by Rohit Jain

Credits Swiss national science foundation
(university of bern + HSLU)

In the extractive economy of gold that I investigate in my work, causality is not a neutral analytic device but a contested terrain with material consequences. Causation is operationalised differently across disciplines, each with protocols for what may count as a cause, an effect, and a legitimate object of inquiry. Their combined authority consolidates into what I call normative causality: a dominant system that can detach violent outcomes from the actors and infrastructures that enable them. Counter Causalities is a research-archive installation that intervenes in these explanatory regimes by treating causal frameworks themselves as objects of inquiry. Rather than attempting to “solve” causality, the archive makes visible howcausal reasoning functions as a political technology that normalises and neutralises extractive violence by shaping what appears relevant, provable, or out of scope. Assembled from doubts that emerge in encounters with documents, sources, and fragments, it reorganises uncertainty into a method for surfacing the frames that render transnational entanglements legible in some ways and illegible in others. Following a rhizomatic logic in which “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be,” the installation refuses a single linear narrative in favour of a practice that can hold multiplicity, simultaneity, and transnational implication without defaulting to exculpation.