Installation view (with work by Beth Collar in foreground), n.b.k. Berlin
In her artistic practice, Bitsy Knox integrates performance, sound, radio, and sculpture, with the medium of text serving as a founda- tion. Grounded in transdisciplinary research, she focuses on how perceptual processes shape representations. For the exhibition at n.b.k., Knox modified two metronomes and positioned them on either side of a crack in the wall, likely caused by subway vibrations. The pendulum hands indeterminately touch and then pull apart, gesturing at an acoustic phenomenon that Knox refers to as “chimeric rhythm.” A diptych of film stills, extracted from the 2014 US horror comedy The Voices, acts as a self-portrait of Knox, here in the background role of Accountant #4. Intrigued by the absence of agency and divinatory potential of the “extra”, Knox repeatedly took background actor jobs on film sets. An in- verted color four of spades affixed to the exhi- bition space window refers to a 1949 psycho- logical experiment by Jerome S. Bruner and Leo Postman in the United States, testing the theory that humans resist experiences that are incongruous with their expectations.