Graphology: drawing from automatism and automation

Graphology considers the range of graphic devices, used by artists working across the disciplines of film, photography, cinema and sculpture, to mediate direct experience. The scope of the exhibition reaches back to the beginning of the 20th century and includes artists who translate human agency into different forms of systematised representation, between the trace and the sign, between writing and drawing, between automatism and automation.

Both exhibition and book renew questions about medium-specificity through the combination of works from very different eras and created by various technologies. The featured artworks and essays investigate the human hand as a living seismograph of inner life, yet concurrently address the ‘mechanical unconscious of the machine’ which imposes itself on the human eye. The book is a collaboration between M HKA (Antwerp), HoGent / KASK (Ghent) and Drawing Room (London). It reflects the several chapters and instalments of the ongoing Graphology project and is conceived as a separate instalment, a sixth chapter, rather than as a catalogue.