“Kapwani Kiwanga’s exhibition, Linear, at Galerie Tanja Wagner explores role of pigment as vector of social control, taking the theories of the American author, Faber Birren, as one of many starting points. Birren’s best known works – relatively speaking – explore the ways in which populations interact with colours. There is a bleak fascination in the way Birren, whose later career is described as that of “an industrial colour consultant”, applied his research into colour; colour for Birren was a means by which institutions could manage human behaviour. Birren actually anticipated by decades some of the more extravagant hopes of the extreme variation of empiricist philosophy known as Behaviourism; but in his relative modesty – again, a highly relativised term when discussing Behaviourist conceptions of human beings – his ideas have proven more durable than those of more high profile Behaviourists like the psycholoigist, B.F. Skinner…”