OCULUS
Heidelberger Kunstverein
March 15 - May 18, 2025

Stephanie Misa & Joscha Steffens
Curated by Patrick Flores

“Seeing things” is a tricky phrase. It may mean grasping objects visually as evidence that they are really in the world. But it may also mean sensing phenomena that are not of this world. The exhibition Oculus delicately moves around this enigmatic instance of seeing things, and it takes the artists Stephanie Misa and Joscha Steffens to historical situations that at once clarify and confound the moment of vision. What things do we see? Is it only things that we see? With the careful mediation of fact through the instruments of science and the sensitive appreciation of fiction through the speculations of art, the exhibition tries to dissipate the binary limit of fact and fiction to anticipate what may well be a third material condition of reflection and action.

The locus of this process is Heidelberg, where the Philippine National Hero Jose Rizal studied ophthalmology in 1886 at the Universitäts-Augenklinik and assisted the clinic’s director, Dr. Otto Becker, in several eye surgeries. At that time, the augenspiegel (ophthalmoscope) was a new device that enabled the physician to see the interior of a living eye. It was also in this city that Rizal wrote parts of his novel Noli Me Tangere (1887), which partly ignited the Philippine revolution against Spain. He stayed with the politically progressive Pastor Karl Ulmer in Wilhemsfeld, a town close to Heidelberg.

These two initiations coming together through visions and investigations, specifically through the aperture and threshold of Rizal, speak to the framework of the Philippine presence as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2025. Taken from the chapter on Sisa in Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, the phrase “the imagination peoples the air” shapes the ethos and theory of such a presence. It evokes the intuitions that make writing and reading possible and surround both the historical atmosphere and the ecology of the species and spirits.

Photos by Studio Visuell & Joscha Steffens