We are currently experiencing a "degree zero," as we are simultaneously approaching several endings. It took some time for the great utopias of the 19th and 20th centuries to be radically questioned and fail in the face of their dismal failure in practice, of gruesome wars, and of the promises of the triumphal march of the individual. However, the wholesale liquidation of the corresponding values goes much faster—of work as a calling, of the family as a fundamental social unit, of public interest as a basic moral value, of place as a fundamental positioning in the world—in short, the liquidation of a part of our religious and civil ethics and moral values. In the midst of disintegrating communities, of the mobilization and globalization of our lives, of the pulverization of essence in favor of appearance, of precedence of the sign over content, of the soul over the right brand name, and in the midst of strange attempts at establishing new imperial world orders, we are facing an individual and collective collapse of identities that even clothes, clubs, sex, vacations, cars, coolness—all those commodities and identities for sale—can only intermittently gloss over with a colorful veneer. And yet, they currently seem to be the only unifying social operative: we can and we must consume. Consumerism is both a right and an obligation, as society's new guiding principle, as "the highest civic duty," as Boris Groys hyperbolically writes in Lettre International 62,2003, "We must not only consume commodities, we are ourselves becoming commodities ourselves ... We must present ourselves to society as perfect consumers."

            This coincidence of consumerist abundance and the obligation to consume on the one hand and the degree zero of meaning on the other raises the urgent and acute question of identity, interior and exterior moral support, order, and the coordinates of our thinking and living. Not everyone is experiencing and living the present as party time; not everyone is leaving existential questions up to cynicism. The blossoming of fundamentalist thought in many societies is a sign of this condition. We are being expelled from established orders into an open world—some of it joyfully experienced as a new freedom, other aspects feared as loss, constraint, dissolution into chaos. New guiding posts, new reasonable and supporting platforms beyond consumerism's apotheosis are hardly in sight. We are once again left with the most simple and essential questions, "Who are we? Where are we? What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What is our context?" We preferably ask these questions as "we," so we won't feel so lonely on our quest.

            The works of the artists in Order and Chaos are approaching this situation from different angles. They confront us with the horrors of the elements, the sudden intrusion of violence and examine their representation. They confront contrasting intellectual and emotional worlds. They dedicate themselves to different forms of self-assessment and focus on the quest for order, coordinates, categories, and stability in the midst of perpetual motion. They use widely different visual forms—concrete and abstract, documentary and staged. And they do it in a conspicuously quiet, concentrated manner free from speculation.

Sophy Rickett (born 1970, lives in London) examines perception, and questions the possibilities of seeing and understanding the world. She conducts her visual research by means of austere, abstract landscape pictures whose colors are scaled down to bright and dark, black and white; form is reduced to foreground and background, trees and sky. In their staged artificiality Sophy Rickett's works read like a little visual didactic plays.

            In Cypress Screen, a panoramic work in three parts, a row of cypresses divides the landscape in foreground and background. Like a black curtain, the somber black of the trees hides whatever might be going on behind them. We are cut off from what might be happening behind, from this light. We are standing on the dark side of the scene. In Playing Fields, a scenery is shown across four images, leading from white, geometrically arranged goalposts, emerging from the disorder of a deep darkness, to dark treetops and a strong light shining through from behind. Similar to Via di Bravetta Part 1, an equally theatrical, night-green work in four parts, the series of four photographs suggests a panorama. But it is a fake panorama as the vantage point changes slightly from one each image to the next. It turns around as if we were following a cinematic travelling shot, sitting behind a moving camera. The image develops like a wave, menacingly building up in front of our eyes. Dead Tree shows a filigree, fragile little tree supported by a stake, extending horizontally over a black background like a rod. Not one leaf is to be seen, only barren branches. A fable, it seems, on the difference between will and ability, and on the precarious balance between our power to shape the world and nature's ways.

            Sophy Rickett's works are circling around the powers of perception (the variety of possible perspectives, crossing in space like condensation trails) and our power to shape the world according to our desires. Colors dark as the night are dominating over strips of light, suggestions of light as enlightenment. Like a metaphysically black outer space, darkness blocking our vision. Her images suggest that knowledge is always fragmented and hard to attain. It evades us; it is always merely the tip of the iceberg; the vantage point of the viewer is in always in motion. The rest is (platonic) shadows.

            Marjaana Kella (born 1961, lives in Helsinki) uses portraits, photographed in front of a gray background, to confront us with a borderline situation. She takes portraits of hypnotized people. We see people in different states, strangely worried, strangely laughing, oddly brooding or heavily breathing, tense. We look at these people, yet we don't see their insides. We don't know what goes on in their mind. A division in a visible and an invisible zone is established: a divided world. Hypnosis has lifted people out of their habitual conscious state flooded by stimuli. In their trance they no longer act consciously, guided by rationality. They are experiencing an interior space, guided by some inner force, or by the hypnotist leading them through emotions or thoughts. They are following "something," a line leading them ever further away from exterior reality the more intensely they become submerged in this state. They are experiencing a borderline situation. Seen from outside, they are "out of it." They are entering other realms, another logic, a different continuum of time. Our Now is not their Now. They are beyond our customary system of reference. The waking state appears to be just one possible system of order, merely one of countless facets of life.

            Sonja Braas (born 1968 in Siegen, Germany, lives in NY) exposes us to the turmoil of "nature." Most of the images in Forces shows wild natural spectacles: water, snow, rocks—everything appears to be in motion, or else solidified and frozen, covered with ice and snow. There is no horizon: our gaze is immediately drawn into these states (of emergency). It is exposed to what is happening without knowing where, when, and how , without finding a point of rest. We appear to be at the mercy of nature, from which there is no escape. But Sonja Braas is playing a game of representation with us. It remains unclear which images were taken in the outside world, in actual nature, and which ones were constructed and merely generated "nature" in the studio. She shamelessly presents them side by side, unsettling our image and concept of nature . Erosion is at work both within and in front of the image. This process creates disturbing moments at various levels. The more subtle the differences between nature and "nature," the more similar is the feeling of looking at these different realities. In the image of nature's presence, the difference is erased. We are in the midst of vast natural forces, surrounded by fog, or spray, in the impenetrable. With some minor exceptions, however, these images don't play the game of German Romanticism, in which the soul keeps expanding and melancholically suffers from being torn apart, alienated from the whole. We are much rather at mercy, on a raft adrift in Géricault's raging, roaring, rapacious sea, exposed to the forces and powers, the erosion and invasion of "nature."

            Marianne Müller (born 1966, lives in Zurich) has taken photographs of pigeons in Brooklyn. Flocks of pigeons, one or several populations—swarming up, swooping down, swerving, taking off and landing. The multi-part work is called The Flock. The birds descend like a WW II bombing squadron, attacking in formation, curving across the sky, getting together, opening up and dispersing, like a breathing cushion that is crumpled and suddenly pops back into shape, as though the cover had been cut and black feathers were scattered across the sky. We see  pigeons landing on a flat roof, entangling themselves in a big jumble, a wild chaos. What was once a tight formation now has turned into a sheer mass of birds. Then there is a single animal, a portrait of a pigeon, almost majestic, followed by another one, whose backlit head is turned away. We see a pigeon coop covered with droppings, a pigeon's egg, a man holding a pigeon in his hand. We follow their trails on the roof, across puddles and smears. Gradually the viewer realizes that the work's pivot is a kind of middle-ground between street and sky, on a rooftop with a pigeon coop, and a man who takes care of them, somewhere in Brooklyn, New York. The geographical place, however, is not important as the work shows it just in passing. This documentary work aims at a more general view. The pigeons could be read as metonyms, the entire work as an allegory of social behavior, oscillating between the feeling of a great sweeping freedom up in the sky, remote from everything, and the terrestrial scraping for food, between vanity, formation and aggression, order and chaos. At the very least, between intelligible order and incomprehensible, seemingly chaotic order. Order and chaos are always a question of perspective, of closeness or distance.

            Janaina Tschäpe (born 1973 in Dachau, Germany, lives in New York and.XXX) has traveled all over the world, sometimes to significant places, for example to Goethe's house in Weimar, mostly, however, to everyday places: hallways, highways, staircases, living quarters, meadows. She lies down on her stomach, making physical contact with the floor, the meadow, the ground, the carpet, the marble, or the concrete. Sometimes her body is embedded; sometimes it lies on top of something; then again it seems as if someone has pushed it there. It does not really look alive but appears to be dead, as if left behind. Neutral-looking, it suggests nothing beyond what we see. But sometimes it seems as though the character "Janaina Tschäpe" were part of a story, and her body battered, raped, or killed. She calls this work One Hundred Little Deaths, each photograph the trace of an encounter. Only they who have abandoned and lost themselves in union may experience the little death. It's about points of contact, moments of unity. She was actually there: she touched, experienced, and felt the place. Janaina Tschäpe's work could be read as a way out, a counterpoint to the loss of place and rootedness, and to total media domination. Janaina Tschäpe has actually and physically traveled the world in order to experience it, to feel it, to be united for a brief moment with one of its many places. It is not the world of signs that imparts life and experience, but physical contact: being here, or there.

            Inés Lombardi (born 1958 in São Paulo (Brazil, lives in Vienna) traveled by boat from the mouth of the Rhine to the Danube delta. It is a long and slow voyage from western to eastern Europe, from the EU to the Balkans, reminiscent of the old trading routes on a waterway system that a few decades ago still was the mainstay of trade in Europe. As Lombardi travels, her gaze falls directly onto the water and shows its movements—calm, sluggish, softly moving or torrential, foaming water—displaying different states of energy. Or her gaze is searching the shoreline, scanning it during the journey. The view widens and turns towards the shoreline, a horizon that runs through the videos and the rhythmically arranged tableaus. The images switch from abstract close-ups to wide-angle views. The world passes by like a picture book—landscapes, villages, industrial zones, faraway and almost removed—and instills a feeling of calm, but also of emptiness and melancholia. The structure of the work, with one or two large-format images and two or three smaller images below, doubles the close-up and distant view, emphasizing the flow of the river, and the selection of segments from its continuity. In these ostentatiously quiet, breathing images of observation as creation and creative vision, the indivdual images and their arrangement add up to a large unity, a representation of spatiality, of geography and time, of flowing, of coming and going. The work confronts drifting in space and the embrace of time passing with the conquest of time in today's world. There is a friction between the feeling of emptiness, concentration, and single-mindedness in these photographs and the abundance, availability, and diversion in the age of commodities and media. A serene, unobtrusive visual plea for time and space as vital ordering principles.

            Juha Nenonen (born 1967, lives in Helsinki) examines categorization, systematization, standardization, classification, and idealization: photographs of a bookcase, full of books with yellow covers (they contain the names of all the Finnish citizens who donated money to the Finnish Foundation for the Arts in 1964), fitted into a doorway and lit by a globular lamp; in images of the sun as the center of light and as pinnacle of enlightenment; of the wristwatch as an index of time; and of a dashing woman, an idealization of "woman" with blue eyes, big lips, and blond hair. The image of the bookshelf embraces symmetry and the charge it imparts on the objects it contains, just as the light of the sun is self-assuredly placed in the center of the image. These images demonstrate acceptance and respect, even though the light of the sun obliterates the view of sun itself and shows nothing but itself,. and the impressive rows of yellow books and the globular lamp are apparently both vying for our attention. In other images, the ruptures are more clearly structured: the idealized woman is actually a peroxide blonde; the sunflowers turn away from the light as they wilt away in vases; an arm, as pale as a corpse, emerges from the darkness at 12:40 AM. The large-format image Untitled (Systematic Department I) may be a key to this series. Shot in the so-called "Systemaattinen Osato" (Systematic Department) of the botanical garden of the University of Helsinki, the image represents an artificial, ordered, groomed, standardized and systematized "nature" as landscape. This systematization is ruptured by "life," by children playing their games. In his images, Nenonen confronts the model with the unexpected, the ideal with transience, the concept with life itself. He builds up a tension between these opposites without resolving it, without deciding for himself (or for us) which side to take.

            Nanna Hänninen (born 1973, lives in Helsinki) moves from Juha Nenonen's garden to the inside, from a diverse and overexcited outside world to a calm and frugal interior world. Entering a world of ideas she sets up minimal, reduced, austere situations: a tidy stack of paper on a wooden pad; white adhesive dots on a yellowish ground (the middle-ground is in focus; the rest is blurred; the circles are dissolving, losing their shape); toothpicks, laid out in two rows, sharp like picket fences; twelve white boxes stacked to form a block of three times four boxes; ash on paper, ash scattered all over or with negative shapes left blank, a division in chaos and order. Her work titles—Fear and Security, Keep under Control, Information Failure—reinforce the idea that these stage-set-like, micro-theatrical scenes are visualized thought, visual aphorisms, emblematic abstractions. In a model-like manner they represent thoughts about the world, about tensions, opposition, overload, sources of error. In her book Fear and Security, she comments on this tension, "Instead of order, I started to see chaos in things. I have been trying to catch the idea of society which is filing, sorting and systematising things to be more secure and organised. I see a great paradox because setting up security measures you cause insecurity of something unknown .... This series (Fear and Security) is about the fear of losing control." Hänninen focuses on the horror of things escaping our mastery and turning against us in concentrated, almost immaculately white images that suggest innocence as well as infinity.

The old orders of the world are falling apart. What new orders will emerge? Numerous values have lost their power to create meaning. Where will it resurface, and what form will it take? The tangible, material world is over-determined by a universe of immaterial signs. Is there a place for our feelings in this universe? Gaining an understanding of the world is increasingly beyond the reach of vision. We cannot see what it is and what it means. Will we be able to remember without traditional visuality? Nature is approaching critical limits. What if it crossed them and turned into "pure" and uncontrolled nature? The ideology of consumerism has engulfed the world. Will it suffocate us? Will we sacrifice everything to it?

These and a number of other questions are raised, addressed and formulated by the works in this book and in the exhibition in a visually precise manner, presented to us as a document or concept of the world. The decision to show works mostly by women is an accidental result of research. Women seem to be clearly and forcefully in control of the quest for meaning, the questioning of order, space, time and existence, as well as of the visualization of these issues. Yet another question the exhibition raises.