(UN)REAL, Science Gallery Rotterdam

What is real, and how are you sure it is so? Can you be confident in your perceptions when so many experiences are digital or influenced by the changing chemistry and architecture of your brain? Biomedical research uncovers ways that our minds and senses produce gaps between the actual and the observed. (UN)REAL, the inaugural exhibition at the Science Gallery Rotterdam at Erasmus MC, invites viewers to engage with art projects that respond to this fertile terrain between the actual and the perceived.

Biomedical research uncovers ways that our minds and senses produce gaps between the actual and the observed. How do we navigate such ‘blind spots,’ which can be exploited by trickery like fake news, but then embraced willingly to escape from reality? Researchers work to answer, as well as to complicate these questions, as we build new understanding of mental conditions such as dementia and phenomena like the placebo effect, and we advance basic research in Neuroscience. At the same time, research in fields such as Genetics and Reproductive and Regenerative Medicine is destabilizing the reality of nature as we know it.

The work included in (UN)REAL addresses topics including our self-perception, the possibility of female sperm, how the eye processes information, and the implications of a human-machine hybrid to produce food. These works can serve as bridges of understanding and platforms for debate, but perhaps even more important, they are welcome signs, announcing a new meeting place for research, society, art, and healthcare.

(UN)REAL was on view at Science Gallery Rotterdam at Erasmus MC from April 3 to July 1, 2020.

Curatorial Team: William Myers, Tess de Ruiter, Rawad Baaklini, Julia van den Hout
Editorial Coordination: Original Copy
Graphic Design: Studio Spass

All photos courtesy of Science Gallery Rotterdam