EXHIBITION · Imagining God · Group Show

MAXUS101 presents Imagining God, an exhibition exploring humanity’s greatest imaginings: about God, about the idea that there must be more between heaven and earth. And about perhaps philosophy’s most enduring question — is there something holding everything together, right now, at this very moment?

The curatorial framework draws its structure from philosopher Alex O’Connor’s distinction between horizontal causality (causes in time, chains of events) and hierarchical causality (forces that are sustained simultaneously, in the present). It is only the hierarchical that forces the question to the fore: if every cause derives its power from another, there must exist at the bottom something that simply is.

Five photographers explore this tension. Kevin Westenberg’s portraits of iconic musicians operate on both registers simultaneously — the culturally constructed star and the unadorned human being in the same image. Manuel Alberto Claro (Stille Liv) and Johnny Jensen (Locus) work in pure presence: places and moments that stand on their own without narrative. Jacob Aue Sobol presents the counter-argument — suffering, the body in pain, the question of how a loving first cause could have chosen this. Neeltje de Vries keeps the space open without resolution.

The exhibition does not argue for faith. It argues for rigour — and for the possibility that photography, created as it is solely with light, is uniquely positioned to grapple with this question.