KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Wie funktionieren Versiche­rungen?

15 May 2013

© Stephan Wilke, 2013
with Thomas Skodlerack, Allianz insurance

Presentation / Café Bravo

From6-8pm

Series: The Bet Teaser Week
To sign an insurance contract means making a bet on the future. You start from the worst case, you bets agains yourself: If you win, you lose. If you lose you are actually the winner. Where and how does an insurance company position itself within this interaction of assumptions and vague predictions?


The Bet teaser week relates to an upcoming project on the subject of The Bet, which will be presented together with the Berliner Festspiele's Foreign Affairs festival. The Bet is a certain pattern of action that relates to belief, and is not causal but rather contingent. A game of chance and risk: even introducing probability calculation does not really change that decisions based on bets do not have any certainty. The week-long teaser during Relaunch invites visitors to take some risk, with a black-jack night and a board game evening. At the same time, the teaser also addresses our wish to protect ourselves from insecurity and prevent unknown situations: on the practical side with an insurance agent's lecture on the insurance mechanism, and from the mystical approach of trying to reading your future in a deck of cards.

Fee: frei/free