The exhibition *Cosmological Critique* is dedicated to the complex body of work by Catherine Christer Hennix (1948, Stockholm – 2023, Istanbul).
Over the course of five decades, Hennix fused music, mathematics, language, and spirituality into a unique space for thought. She viewed her works as “semiotic objects”—signs, diagrams, texts, and compositions of sound and light—through which she sought to explore and transform perception and the processes by which meaning is formed.
Drawing on the experimental music scenes of Stockholm and New York, Hennix developed an approach beginning in the late 1960s that straddled minimalist composition, mathematical research, and metaphysical speculation. Her development was shaped by encounters with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and Pandit Pran Nath, whose ideas had a lasting influence on her understanding of time, sound, and continuity. At the same time, she engaged intensively with the philosophical, logical, and linguistic foundations of mathematics and served, among other roles, as a visiting professor at the first Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.
*Cosmological Critique* is the artist’s most comprehensive exhibition to date in Germany, spanning a range from early graphic notations to immersive installations, abstract Nō dramas, painting, and sculpture, as well as questions of transfeminist aesthetics and politics. Recurring approaches drawn from mathematics or psychoanalysis function here less as references and more as the very structure of the works themselves. These can be read as manifestations of a radical conceptual and critical project in which poetic, mathematical, musical, and artistic forms of knowledge are inextricably interwoven, and in which Western categories of thought and media orders dissolve into a cosmic perspective.
