The Cat in the Box

Shadwa Ali, Nikki Middlemiss, Elia Setiadi, Seraina Semmelroggen, Olivia Vidovic

Curated by Filipa Ramos

Opening Wednesday 2 April 2025, 5.30 pm  
Exhibition 3 – 13 April 2025
Opening hours: Friday to Sunday, 2 – 6pm

Salon Mondial, Basel / Münchenstein
ateliermondial.com

This year, we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the collaboration between Atelier Mondial and Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. Since 2015, the international residency program and the Institute have organized exhibitions that bring together art students with the international artists in residency at Atelier Mondial in Basel/München. The spring 2025 exhibition coincides with the spring symposium Quantum Knowledge: States, Systems, Fictions of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW (2 – 3 April 2025), held in conjunction with the UN’s International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, celebrating 100 years of quantum mechanics. Curated by Filipa Ramos, The Cat in the Box echoes and reverberates the symposium’s topics, featuring a series of artworks that expand on the ways in which quantum science shapes our lives, spatial relations, and worldviews.

The Cat in the Box is a thought-experiment turned into an exhibition. A thought-experiment is a possibility, conceptualized by theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887 – 1961), to speculate about what is life, balancing the inanimate and the animate, mystery and science. In his most famous thought-experiment, Schrödinger imagined a cat inside a box where there was also a jar with poison and a radioactive matter that could break the jar of poison and kill the cat. Or not. With this exercise, he created a problem that no one, not even himself, could resolve. Until today, this cat exists simultaneously alive and dead in people’s minds. Even if what mattered to the scientist was not the cat but the uses of quantum knowledge. With this thought-experiment, he showed that quantum knowledge isn’t made to predict the future but to offer explanations about the world. As such, quantum science has the same function as myths: to offer plausible but also strange and paradoxical ways of making sense of life.

Inspired by Schrödinger’s proposal, The Cat in the Box is an exhibition that tells no straightforward story. It actually tells no story at all. Instead, it considers how art may ask questions, activate encounters, offer glimpses of ideas that may or may not be there, and how observation changes the observed. It operates through chain effects: an artist who presents their work and invites another artist to do the same. The result is an exhibition that happens in mysterious ways, entangled, almost by magic, like in quantum physics.