The title sets the viewer to reflect and to look for truth. Deduction (Lat. deductio, "leading out") is the basic instrument of logical proof: a chain of reasoning whose links are joined by inference, in which a particular conclusion follows from a general one. Given reliable premises, deduction gives a hundred-per-cent guarantee of a correct conclusion — deduction from truth yields truth.
So the exhibition leads away from the general picture of the world and into particular stories, and offers the visitor reliable premises — from a range of artists from around the world — to understand a truth and draw their own conclusions from it. It brings together long-established names, A K Dolven, Sean Snyder and Antonio Paucar, with the newer Yafei Qi and Natalia Egorova, and a correspondingly wide range of technique: documentary footage, feature film, difficult shooting from an unmanned drone, and a hand-held camera on 16 mm.
All five reflect on the same knot of terms — the human, nature, civilisation, freedom — and all five are held together by movement: chaotic and restless in Dolven's iceberg, interrupted and fragile in Snyder's drone, slow, meditative and smooth in Yafei's figures, ritual in Paucar, monotonous and repeating in Egorova's step. Alive or dead? Nature, people, machines — who rules? Are people insignificant and weak, or have they been strong and powerful since ancient times?
Deduction is the second part of a trilogy. It follows Induction (Murmansk, 2015) and precedes Abduction (Oslo, 2020).
