Die Probe (the rehearsal, the trial, the test), a duo exhibition by Virginie Bailly and Willem Boel, unfolds within the framework of VIENNA ART WEEK’s “Navigating Angst”, a theme that considers how art can help us confront a world marked by profound uncertainty, ecological crisis and political anxiety without necessarily providing simple solutions.

For Bailly and Boel, it is precisely the desire for simple solutions that needs to be questioned. In a reality increasingly shaped by polarisation, acceleration and short-term thinking, complexity is easily reduced to something manageable: a single image, an opinion, an answer. Their work moves in the opposite direction. Rather than narrowing the field of vision, both artists seek to keep it open.

The title Die Probe — the rehearsal, the trial, the test — embodies this position. A rehearsal is not a conclusion. It is a temporary state in which something can be attempted, reconsidered, altered or abandoned. Failure and uncertainty are not interruptions of the process but necessary parts of it. In this sense, Die Probe proposes an artistic attitude that embraces not-knowing as a productive condition.

This tension between simplicity and complexity connects both practices. Neither Bailly nor Boel attempts to translate the anxieties of the present into recognisable images or singular problems that might subsequently be solved. Instead, their works resist the pressure to arrive too quickly at an answer. They create situations in which different perspectives, contradictions and uncertainties can remain present simultaneously.

Within “Navigating Angst”, this refusal becomes significant. To navigate does not necessarily mean to know exactly where one is going. It can also mean learning to move through uncertainty while remaining attentive to what appears along the way. Art, from this perspective, is less a tool for resolving anxiety than a space in which our relationship to uncertainty can be reconsidered.

Die Probe therefore proposes openness as a counterweight to fear. Against short-term thinking, it introduces duration and repetition. Against the narrowing of perspective, it offers multiplicity. Against the demand for immediate clarity, it allows ambiguity, curiosity and wonder.The exhibition does not offer a map out of uncertainty. Instead, Bailly and Boel invite us to remain within it for a while: to rehearse, to reconsider, to look again — and perhaps to discover that keeping the mind open is itself a way of navigating.