“Almost nothing was visible, that is to say: already something other than nothing was visible in that almost. One actually saw, then, something else, simply in the looking forward to it or the desiring of it.”

– Georges Didi-Huberman, The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)

The Heart is a Pump is an exhibition project that takes its name after a poem by Bob Flanagan. It evolves across three parts with attending film screenings and conversations, exploring the motifs of pain, repetition and submission in Christian iconography and beyond.

Kristian Vistrup Madsen is a writer and curator based in Berlin. In 2025, he curated Mood Curriculum, a series of events and podcasts at Simian in Copenhagen that sought to define the notion of Stimmung as essential to artistic and curatorial practice.