The value in mathematics

Two years ago, by chance, I read a text about how cultural values have permeated the way we think about mathematics and mathematics education. Although I was aware of how mathematics has been instrumentalised, more often than not maintaining and pushing inequality, I realised then that I was still attached to the idea of mathematics as a universal, purely abstract – and therefore value-free – language. I evenconsidered it as one, potentially, complete, body of knowledge. The text, which advocated an anti-racist review of maths education, offered a more complex view. In my eagerness, I absorbed this as a full antithesis:

mathematics fallen off the pedestal of logic and reason, covered with the dirt of past and present, insisting on a claim to ‘truth’ that had long been revealed as a delusion. A mathematics pretending to be one perfect language developed in an almost perfect linear way, to conceal that it is in fact a set of mathematics appropriated by various groups of people throughout a series of cross-cultural encounters. Finally, a mathematics that is unable to accept that it is but one amongst many - different but equal.

Although this new outlook seemed entirely more realistic than my previous idealised conception, I felt it was necessary to (re)construct the process of thought that would lead me from one perspective to the other - to investigate the cognitive process of revision instead of simply replacing one position with another. I wanted to understand the cultural conditioning that had established my viewpoint in the first place, as much as I wanted to learn from deconstructing, step by step, the ideas at the start of it. An accountability of sorts.

 Falke Pisano

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This exhibition is in two parts:

Part I: 15 October - 15 November, Hollybush Gardens, London
Part II: 31 October - 19 December, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam

Falke Pisano lives and works in Berlin. She is the 2o13 recipent of the Prix de Rome. Her recent soloexhibitions include REDCAT, Los Angeles, 2015, Praxes, Berlin, 2014, Constellations of One and Many (in collaboration w Archive Books), ar/ge kunst, Galerie Museum / Galleria Museo, Bolzano 2014, and The Showroom, London 2013. Recent group exhibitions include: One Million Years – System und Symptom, The Kunstmuseum Basel Museum für Gegenwartskunst 2014 - 2015, Istanbul Biennale 2013, Amsterdam Pavilion, Shanghai Biennale and Beyond Imagination, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 2012. She has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Synagogue de Delme, Delme, 2016 We gratefully acknowledge the support of Mondrian Fund, Gallery at REDCAT (Los Angeles), Beaufort Beyond Borders and CAC Synagogue de Delme (Delme) towards the production of works.