Laila Svensgaard
we can know more than we can tell, 2015
audio recording and performance

An MFA exam project in Critical and Pedagogical Studies at Malmö Art Academy.

"We can know more than we can tell" takes, as its point of departure, the oral tradition of storytelling and illuminates, through the figure of the storyteller, different aspects of knowledge production and the parting of knowledge in visual art practices.

"We can know more than we can tell" takes the form of an audio recording that is based on a series of interviews Laila Svensgaard had, with various visual artists with different art practices behind them. She asked them to talk about what they consider knowledge and how they consider this knowledge being parted. From this material a fictitious tale is constructed that Svensgaard retells in her own words.

In “we can know more than we can tell” Svensgaard takes on the role of the storyteller, who tells from the experiences reported by others. And in turn making them the experience of those who listens to her tale. Her re-enactment addresses questions of ownership, originality and the oral tradition as method within the field of art practice. A method that is significantly still present in the teaching forms of today such as the studio visit and the artist talk.

The title "we can know more than we can tell" refers in the context of the project to the concept of tacit knowledge. Coined, by the Hungarian-British scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, in his book "The Tacit Dimension" from 1966, he describes tacit knowledge as an ideas-based, but integrated experience of actions in which the proximal parts form a coherent whole and thus reveal a quality that the separate parts do not possess individually.

Laila Svensgaard is a Copenhagen based visual artist.
She is educated at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design (BFA), London, UK and

Malmö Art Academy (MFA), Malmö, Sweden.