Curatorial description
Finger in the Heart
The eponymous Finger in the Heart emerges at the intersection of science, violence, ignorance, and emotion. It directly refers to a plaster cast of the finger of the legendary Wrocław cardiac surgeon Wiktor Bross, whose research and pioneering operations were conducted at the Clinics. In 1955 Bross started using his finger to widen the patient’s mitral valve during open-heart surgery. The preserved model shows the precise depth to which the finger had to be inserted into the left ventricle in order to obtain the desired valve width. The cast is therefore simultaneously a medical instrument – which uses the body of a specific person for precise measurements – and a peculiar scientific relic. The now-abandoned Clinic buildings, where groundbreaking therapies were once developed and generations of doctors trained, stand as silent witnesses to the inevitable obsolescence of knowledge.
The pioneering gesture of inserting a finger into a beating heart symbolised a triumph of advanced science and profound expertise. It may also be read as marking the end of the mythologisation of the heart as the seat of emotion, including melancholy and sadness. Before the circulatory system was fully understood, it was widely believed that a vein linked the ring finger of the left hand directly to the heart.
The belief in the vena amoris – the “vein of love” thought to transmit emotional impulses to the heart – was once so deeply rooted that engagement and wedding rings came to be worn on the ring finger of the left hand. Modern science has unambiguously disproved the existence of this mythical vessel, dethroning the heart from its privileged status as the organ of love. The history of science, after all, is largely a chronicle of contesting and revising established truths: what were once considered facts have often become absurdities, which is particularly visible in the development of Western medicine.
The extraordinary progress of science, especially during the second half of the 19th century, gave rise to a transnational cult surrounding its revolutionary achievements – and, by extension, its practitioners, particularly physicians. In this aura of exceptionality, science became unassailable. The involvement of scientists in totalitarian regimes or acts of genocide was not only tolerated but, in many cases, rationalised and even forgiven.
The former Wrocław Clinics, while sites of immense scientific accomplishment, also conceal darker chapters in their history. In the 1890s, Professor Albert Neisser, head of the Dermatology Clinic, injected sex workers infected with syphilis – including underage girls – with serum, without informing them of his research or the experimental nature of his procedure. Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, a key architect of National Socialist racial legislation that paved the way for the extermination of Jews and Roma, was also associated with the Clinics. During the Second World War, the Clinic of Psychiatry and Neurology (known until 1945 as the Clinic of Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases) was headed by Werner Villinger, who was involved in the selection of people experiencing acute psychiatric crises and those with intellectual disabilities, including minors, for the Nazi euthanasia and sterilisation programme. He also authorised medical experiments on patients within his institution.
Finger in the Heart is a reflection on violence as the dark side of progress and on the dogma of the infallibility of rational reason. It offers a point of departure for examining the mechanisms that order our perception of the world, our conviction in the righteousness of our actions, and the hierarchies sustaining systems of knowledge production. Here, science ceases to be the subject of research and instead becomes the object of contemplation on the interplay of power, inaccessibility, and the illusion of universality that constitute its authority.
The inverse of this narrative is a turn towards mystery – towards what remains hidden or irrational. This essentially Romantic mode of thought persists today, finding expression both in contemporary spiritualism and in conspiracy theories. What binds the occult and Enlightenment paradigms is a shared yearning to approach the unknown. Finger in the Heart thus becomes a symbol of transgression, revelation, and profanation which, rather than violating the sacred, opens new realms of inquiry.
Sound Art Forum
Medicine as a scientific discipline employed methods of sound research long before they were formally named or categorised. Texts on acoustic ecology often cite René Laennec’s invention of the stethoscope, while the cinematic audiosphere of hospital interiors is unimaginable without the rhythmic pulse of a cardiac monitor. The remarkable film De Humani Corporis Fabrica by the sociologist-filmmaker duo Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor – an homage to the human body – offers an immersive journey into its internal soundscape, employing recordings from medical cameras and operating theatres. The questions raised by these artists regarding the ways in which we experience and comprehend reality follow a trajectory akin to that of sound studies: they probe the complexity of the world by sifting through the detritus and residues of daily existence – phenomena that, though omnipresent, often evade our perception.
Both medical and sonic practices demand attentiveness and precision. The increasing proliferation of intelligent devices capable of capturing the minutest vibrations – whether those of the human body or of the surrounding audiosphere – reveals the extent to which our cognition is dependent on technological advancement. Do we truly hear more with our ever-more digital ears? What will the people – or machines – that listen to our recordings in one hundred, two hundred, or even a thousand years hear about us?
