This show analyses the use of systems—both conceptually and in the way works of art are produced—in contemporary art at the turn of the twenty-first century. The exhibition’s point of departure is The third of may (2023), a recently donated piece by Ai Weiwei on display in this room. Ai has identified the wooden moveable-type printing of the Song dynasty (around AD 1000) as an early forerunner of this toy-brick composition.

This need to systematise and encode production processes becomes apparent when we observe how artists approach the creative act. The use of such formulas means that they can develop extensive series based on these methodologies, and also that works can be replicated, often with no need for the artist’s “hand”, because they follow a predetermined pattern. These strategies, derived from the end of the postmodern condition, have defined part of the creative model of recent decades. This production system reinforces the notion of style and has an indirect bearing on the idea of artistic attribution, while also diluting the physical reality of the creative act in the artist’s studio.

An in-depth examination of the featured works will reveal quite a range, from autonomous systems to dependent systems and from inflexible, closed methodologies to open-ended processes. Intersecting conversations are established to facilitate interaction between closed-loop and organic, dynamic systems. The generation of these systems is precisely what saves us from the abyss and gives us a foothold on the precipice. Reordering chaos and reinterpreting history as two ways of analysing contemporary culture and the present. This frozen, trapped, looped time—fundamentally at odds with a modular, additive system under construction—encapsulates many of the questions of our day and age, like a singular archaeological record of late capitalist thought. The continued relevance of these exercises, ranging from 1990 to 2023, situates us somewhere between figuration at one degree centigrade and the accelerated abstraction they advocate.