Hundreds of questions, handwritten in four different languages, are projected onto the wall in playfully undulating patterns. Combining grandiose metaphysical speculation and the mundane problems of everyday life, Questions (2002-03) explores the point where the profound slips into the ridiculous. Fischli / Weiss have described them as questions that don’t demand a response but instead make you wonder what kind of person would ask such a thing. As one impossible question follows another, they begin to suggest the workings of an incoherent and restless mind. ‘In a certain way, it leads to a dissolution of the self if all of these things simply whirl about unanswered – a feverish, disoriented state that’s upsetting because it’s unstoppable’, Weiss has said. ‘We did in fact imagine a presence at the centre of this multitude of questions, and we made speculations about the person. Most likely it was a man who lets everything run through his head before falling asleep – thus the projection of questions in the dark.’

The tiny sketches, such as a pecking bird and a van with its headlights blazing, are like casual doodles, adding to this sense of a mind wandering. According to Fischli, ‘they’re like decorations on a Christmas tree; one doesn’t really need them but they somehow spread a good mood anyway.’

This installation was the culmination of a series of works composed of absurd questions, including a book called Will Happiness Find Me? The use of text is reminiscent of the Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the physical art object is less important than the ideas that it embodies. It also emphasises the philosophical character of Fischli / Weiss’s art, a willingness to question the world that doesn’t take itself too seriously.