Source: http://responsive-halifax.com/category/info/
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 15:00:51+00:00

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//RESPONSIVE International Light Art Projects was successful in receiving a $50k grant to commission three new, site-specific light projects by Marianne Nicolson (BC), Cuppetelli & Mendoza (DET) and Christine Sciulli (NY). Each of the artists will be coming to Halifax in early 2019 to select sites, do on the ground research and give a public lecture at NSCAD University.
Marianne Nicolson (‘Tayagila’ogwa) is an artist of Scottish and Dzawada̱’enux̱w First Nations descent. The Dzwada̱’enux̱w People are a member tribe of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw Nations of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Her training encompasses both traditional Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw forms and culture and Western European based art practice. She has completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1996), a Masters in Fine Arts (1999), a Masters in Linguistics and Anthropology (2005) and a PhD in Linguistics, Anthropology and Art History (2013) at the University of Victoria. She has exhibited her artwork locally, nationally and internationally as a painter, photographer and installation artist, has written and published numerous essays and articles, and has participated in multiple speaking engagements. Her practice engages with issues of Aboriginal histories and politics arising from a passionate involvement in cultural revitalization and sustainability.
Sciulli’s ROIL was shown at Brooklyn’s Smack Mellon Gallery in early 2016 and it was awarded a Lighting Award (UK) and Lumen Citation from the Illuminating Engineering Society. Her work was included in the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2014 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts. Her projection installations have been shown in numerous galleries and museums including the Shirley Fiterman Art Center, Parrish Art Museum, Islip Art Museum, South Fork Museum of Natural History, Frederieke Taylor Gallery, Edward Hopper House Art Center and Smithsonian Affiliate Annmarie Gardens, as well as in International light and music festivals. She was the recipient of a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Grant for her public art project Intercepting Planes X. Christine was commissioned by the Global Poverty Project to create her installation, Expanding Circles, projected onto 2,500 people, for the 2013 Global Citizen Festival. Sciulli will have a solo show at Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, and NY in February 2019.
Annica Cuppetelli and Cristobal Mendoza began collaborating as Cuppetelli and Mendoza in 2010. They create installations and objects that combine physical elements with digital technologies, composing sensual, immersive and dynamic experiences. Cuppetelli and Mendoza stage an interplay of the analog and the digital sphere. In the tradition of Op-Art they develop responsive sculptures that focus on the interference of textiles structures and graphical digital animation. The full range of properties shows when visitors not only view but move and interact with work.
Based in Detroit, their work has been exhibited in the Denver Art Museum, the Bienal de Video y Artes Mediales in Chile and in festivals such as Nemo 2013 (France), Scopitone 2012 (France), ISEA 2012, FILE 2011 (Brazil), FAD 2011 (Brazil) and video_dumbo 2013 and 2011 (New York). They were selected as Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellows for 2015. Cuppetelli received a MFA in Fibers from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Mendoza received a MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design.
//RESPONSIVE International Light Art Project returns from it’s successful 2017 debut in the fall of 2019! September 25 – 28, 2019 the curatorial team will welcome over a dozen international light artists to Halifax for another exciting indoor/outdoor exhibition scattered around the city’s centre. Stay tuned for more information. Artists, locations and events will be announced throughout the year.
//From October 18 to 21, 2017 the International Light Art Project //RESPONSIVE will take place in Downtown Halifax. Sixteen artists activate eight public sites including the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the historic Black-Binney House, Dalhousie School of Architecture, City Hall, the Memorial Library, NSCAD Anna Leonowens Gallery, and St. David’s Church.
Opening hours are nightly from 7.00 pm to Midnight. All sites are free during this time. Guided tour depart at 8pm nightly from the Art Bar +Projects .
Judith Roeder is one of the participating artists in the first edition of //RESPONSIVE International Light Art Project Halifax. His work is on display at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
//For more than fifteen years, glass and its physical, esthetical and metaphorical assets has been the material and the qualities of choice for the artistic research of Judith Roeder. She focuses on the differentiation between the translucent properties of glass in opposition to its reflection and refraction properties when filtering light. She renders visible its permeability and non-permeability which lies beneath the glossy skin. “Focusing on just one material requires restraint and consequence, but it also gives freedom to explore the multiple possibilities it presents. The artist however does not attempt to create new qualities, but rather uncover the existing ones, thus in her realizations she often uses industrial or recovered glass. Its properties, hitherto hidden from the eye and mind, are isolated and set in motion in her conceptual works. Thanks to this transition, the energy of the body at rest becomes the energy of action.” [Zofia Reznik: Alternative States of Matter].
For part of her works, she scratches the glass surface to destroy the transparency. Engraving glass is as old as glassmaking itself, dating well before glassblowing was invented . The British artist Simon Whistler [1940-2005] described engraving glass as drawing with light: “My own analogy of glass is to imagine that it is actually made of light; light trapped between two polished skins. Scratch the surface and light is released at that place. The engraver’s task is to find and release the light in the way that best expresses his ideas.” Judith Roeder is interested in the transition of light through glass to explore the optical properties that lay beneath the translucent surface. Her works encompass single or multiple lawyers of glass sheets as reliefs or as sculptures, and she uses a range of light sources from daylight to UV-light to digital projection for her installations – depending on the phenomenological and esthetical aspects she wants to refer to.
The appearance of all her works depend on the light situation they are placed in and space is the third building material, that Judith Roeder uses for the composition of her works. In her compositions, the geometry of light intersects with the geometries of shape and space, and governs the interplay of position, environment and viewpoint.
With the projection of still and moving images onto glass objects, her works reflect on the culminating distortion of images by the lenses of the camera, the image projector and the human eye as the perceiving visual system. Her focus is on the esthetic experience as a moment of contemplation and research and her imagery fathoms its translation on transit through material and media. Obviously, the dynamics of interdependencies are in the focus of her artistic research and give grounds to her conceptual ideas.
Kelly Mark is one of the participating artists in the first edition of //RESPONSIVE International Light Art Project Halifax. During //RESPONSIVE her work is on display at 1472 Hollis St.
//To get an idea of how Kelly Mark is working, here a small collection of selected quotes by curators who worked with her from 1995 when she left NSCAD to date.
“Kelly Mark’s participation in local exhibitions over the past years has already established her as a contributor to the renewal of critically motivated sculpture in Halifax … The phrase “critically motivated“ denotes ways of working that bring the sculptural object into problematic relationships with its own processes, past art practices, and current modes of experiencing the world … The associated themes of commodity and context, replication and simulation give impetus to figurative and appropriative strategies in their art making. Kelly Mark participates in these agendas while positioning herself independently in the milieu.
With their minimal alterations of found objects and simple representation strategies, the individual works look provisional. Yet, because the “present” ready-made objects and materials, the works are also specific. There can be no mistaking what they are in the factual sense … For informed viewers, the evocation of moments in the history of twentieth-century art – Duchamp’s assisted ready-mades, Minimalism’s seriality, Eva Hesse’s variation-within-repetition, Jackie Winsor’s mutilated boxes – seems equally unambiguous.
Mark’s allegiance to artistic strategies of the 1960s and 70s lets her inhabit her work without risking the personal disclosures that some contemporary artists insist on. With its imaginative revision of modernism’s official story, the integrity of Kelly Mark’s work is revelation enough for the attentive viewer.
In 1999, Kelly Mark took part in the exhibition titled “Centrifugal” at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. The following excerpt is from the catalogue accompanying the exhibition. “The exhibition “Centrifugal” is a public art project that seriously addresses the environmental impact and function of a busy urban environment on the individual. Curated specially for the city of Hamilton and installed in parking lots, the works in the exhibition offer strategic connections with the rapid movement of traffic in and out of the city. [Shirley Madill, Senior Curator] … “Free Parking was very Kelly Mark. It was a smart play: a combination of the artist’s quick and incisive wit, and a sense of place and economy. Mark thought of the exhibition as an offering to the public and made a work that explicitly realized that. Based loosely on the board game Monopoly, she offered free parking to various people each day of the exhibition – a gesture, an invitation, an outstretched hand to the community – calibrated by her total project budget. The lot was the board, the public were the players, the Art Gallery of Hamilton was the bank. Mark identified the piece simply and subtly, with a small sign fixed to a giant wall (painted with the familiar free parking symbol from the board game). The attendant in the booth used his own judgment and whimsy to decide who, each day, would receive the small but unexpected gift of free parking. The chosen ones walked away with a stamped stub showing the artist’s signature and that familiar free parking retro car. Most people were delighted.
Duane Linklater: Who was here before?
Duane Linklater is one of the participating artists in the first edition of //RESPONSIVE International Light Art Project Halifax. After winning the Sobey Art Award in 2013, one of the five parts of the work “Tautology” stayed in the collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and will be shown for the first time since then during //RESPONSIVE at the Anna Leonowens Gallery.
//Duane Linklater is concerned with qualities of representation, collective memory, and distribution of power. As an artist, curator and activist, he is committed to the interference of the political-cultural development of Canadian society and the attitude and engagement with First Nation’s people, their representation and participation in contemporary society.
Working in installation, film and other media as well as performative, Linklater reflects on the encoded mindsets in gestures, habits, and rules in the present culture and addresses ongoing issues of the indigenous cultures, the colonial heritage and the present frameworks of reflection and recognition. His collaborative projects bring critical awareness to the issues of author- and ownership, to strategies of documentation and systems of archiving.
Through numerous gallery exhibits, video and film screenings, magazine profiles, artist residencies, curatorial interventions and community engagements, Linklater has become a leading voice in Canada’s contemporary arts. His approach to art-making enables collaboration and facilitates audience engagement. In 2011, he initiated “Wood Land School”, a project that seeks to center Indigenous forms and ideas in the institutional spaces that it inhabits. In 2017 “Wood Land School” inhabits the SBC Gallery in Montreal and it has been part of the Documenta 14  in Athens [gr] and Kassel [de].
Cuppetelli and Mendoza is one of the participating artists’ teams in the first edition of //RESPONSIVE International Light Art Project Halifax. Their work can be seen at Anna Leonowens Gallery.
Cuppetelli and Mendoza further what has been called Op-art since the 1960s. Op-art – the abbreviation for optical art – is based on illusions that occur in the interplay of geometry, optics and perception. Their characteristics are drawings, paintings or reliefs that engender the impression of movement, of flashing or vibrating, of swelling or warping although they are static. “Pictures that attack the eye” was the explaining headline of a feature on Op-art in the Time Magazine published on October 23, 1964. “Preying and playing on the fallibility in vision is the new movement of “optical art” that has sprung up across the Western world. No less a break from abstract expressionism than pop art, op art is made tantalizing, eye-teasing, even eye-smarting by visual researchers using all the ingredients…” were the opening lines and in fact, Op-art compositions create a sort of visual tension in the viewer’s mind that evoke the illusion of space and movement.
Yaacov Agam, Bridget Riley, Jesús Rafael Soto and Viktor Vasarely are among the internationally known artists for their Op-art works. They became infatuated with physics, mathematics and graphic studies, and experimented with textural effects, shadow, light and perspective. With their artistic research, they aimed to blur the borders between painting, sculpture and performance. In their footsteps, Cuppetelli and Mendoza explore the dynamics of the interaction of graphic pattern, spatial structures, space and movement in their works. They play with the overlay of the analog and the digital sphere to explore the way and the variety of shapes and forms engendered by each of their settings. Their works are objects, installations and performances at the same time.
In 1965, the Museum of Modern Art in New York celebrated Op-art with the exhibition “The Responsive Eye” artists such as Josef Albers, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin were featured. It focused on the perceptual aspects of art that result from the illusion of movement and the interaction of color and form. It caught major public attention and Op-art became influential for architecture, design, fashion and music. Vasarely credited the invention of Op-art with the experience of studying the way the intense light in southern France that affected his vision. Carlos Cruz-Díez, Julio Le Parc, Heinz Mack and Guenther Uecker are among those who deepened their work with optical phenomena by working on the interplay of light and perception. Expanding their approach, Cuppetelli and Mendoza work with interaction of the properties of light as the primary medium of the visual sphere and as the medium of display of the digital sphere. In their works, they refer to light as the medium that governs the visual experience.
In the 21st Century, computer programs reproduce optical patterns with ease that had been done by hand and over time by the artists of the 20th century. To date, the artistic research that encompasses the geometrical, optical and perceptional aspects can be found in the field of “projection mappings”. Here optical effects are used to alter surfaces of 3d objects or of architecture by projection. Artists use it to and advertisers to add dimensions or and notions of movement onto static objects. Projection mapping has been used for vj’ing and for gaming, it has been set on stage by dance, theater and entertainment and is has been used by fine artists like Refik Anadol, Klaus Obermaier and Quayola among others. Due to its stunning effects, it has been widely used in advertisement and event. Due to its non-invasive qualities, it has been used in historic, culture-historic and art-historic contexts as a method of research as well as of mediation.
Projection mapping dates to the 1960’s as well. Filmed head-shots of singers projected onto busts of the singers became – as the “‘Grim Grinning Ghosts” – part of the “Haunted Mansion”-ride in Disneyland in 1969. The same technic was used by the American artist Tony Oursler for his signature works of animated and projected faces onto arranged soft cloths or found objects from the 1990s. In the viewer’s perception, the motion of the digital image is transferred to the static object which is the projection ground. To date, the interplay of tracking physical objects to superimpose digital imagery is constantly refined.
Cuppetelli and Mendoza explore these mapping techniques in abstract forms. They work with geometric forms and patterns only. When they started to experiment with the interplay of textile objects and digital projections, they encountered a series of interference patterns known from analog drawing, painting and printing. The moiré pattern caught their interest. For it to appear, two or more geometric patterns must be close but not be completely identical and positioned slightly shifted, rotated or displaced. Annica Cuppetelli and Cristobal Mendoza combined their knowledge on fibers and textiles – her background – and the expertise on digital technologies and projections – his background – and started to explore the interchange of their two realms working on interference patterns.
Patterns, repetition and interaction are aspects relevant to both textile processing and computer programming. They took their commonalities to create works that reflect on the intersection of these two spheres. Until today, their focus is on installations based on textile structures fused with graphical digital animation.
By not only mapping the object but by mapping the viewer as well, Cuppetelli and Mendoza realize works that are responsive to their audience. The full range of properties of their body of work shows when visitors not only view but also move and interact in front of the installation. The installations respond to their viewers with change. They translate the viewer’s movement into their setting and allow a playful exploration to unfold. In projection mapping, the development of the responsive circle is great motivation for all the developers and constantly new tools and interfaces pop up to improve the interaction.
Their installations include reliefs and objects as center pieces of the responsive environments and their site-specific interventions make use of architectural features to build reactive works. In the tradition of the Op-art movement, their first environments were done in black and white, and since 2015, they include color phenomena in their works. Both started their independent careers after finishing their studies and started their joint artistic research in 2010. Sharing his studio for a while, they discussed the options of intertwining their realms and started to explore the idea. By now, they received several awards, including the Detroit-based Kresge Art Award of $ 25.000 in 2015: “The Kresge gives us a push into the next stage of our careers, to make more challenging work, to experiment and do things we’ve wanted to do, but haven’t had the time or resources,” said Mendoza.
joeressen+kessner is one of the participating artists’ teams in the first edition of //RESPONSIVE International Light Art Project Halifax. Their work can be seen at Halifax City Hall.
//joeressen+kessner engender site-specific interventions that allow to perceive, to understand and to categorize a site in a new quality. Preferred, they work with historically charged sites to which they respond with transmedia interventions. Their works are digitals systems that interfere with the analog status quo via image and sound applications. They generate data systems that control audiovisual projections which are applied in real-time to a chosen environment. Their transmedia compositions are based on dialogic principles ranging from between the two artists, between to two spheres “audio” and “visual”, between analog and digital architecture, between light and sound waves, between the material and immaterial dimension.
In their research on a site, they cover architectural concepts and structures, emblematic qualities and acoustic patterns. They ponder on function and use, history and memory, experiences and associations as well as culture-historical, scientific or theoretical aspects. The process of exploring and developing constantly shifts between concrete and universal, specific and fundamental, practice and theory. They collect and sort, reflect and experiment with their finding to develop a semantic map that serves as the foundation of their compositions.
In the development process, joeressen+kessner focus on the transition of how coding content leads to a character, on how the hosting medium influences the appearance and on how space and time alter a digital figuration – in general as well as on the site in particular. They consider a character an abstract unit where a formative framework and associated meaning, significance and representation are in constant, reciprocal negotiation. They develop set of characters as an artistic system of that allow expression, that can be read as a language, and that allow hosting knowledge in a new way. Their works come as digital character sets that drive image and sound projections that interfere with the appearance of the space. Their encodings instruct self-organizing processes, and these develop as autonomous patterns in which the intentional and the non-intentional engender a performative play. This leads to rhizome of influences that are too complex to be fully analyzed and which can only be understood by extended observation of the interaction. The unpredictable part of this approach links to them to artistic approaches based on generative processing but to ensure their artistic autonomy, joeressen+kessner work without pre-programmed standards as well as without any form of presets and plug-ins.
They form a network of interconnected paths and tracks which overlap each other and branch out repeatedly as a real-time environment. Unlike image systems as known from film, video, and animation which are generated separately, illuminated, reckoned, reworked and cut before they are broadcasted, real-time processing is a high performative system in which rendering and display coincide and which reinvent itself while performing. By coding open systems, a continuous change between analysis, instruction, and expression takes place. The traditional separation between development, production, and performance is abolished and notation, recording and display are modulated in real time. Complexity, incomprehensibility, and incompleteness are part of this kind of artistic research. The formatting of these processes is the composition process of joeressen+kessner.
The implementation of the digital dimension in an analog space via projection allows to disintegrate found settings and limitations and permits a redesign of references, reference sets, and reference qualities. The physical space with its architectural, spatial and temporal ratios turns into a media system. Light as primary media of the analog sphere and as the media of display of the digital sphere serves as the interface and permits the linkage.
With their transmedia interventions, joeressen+kessner further a development that altered the canon of fine arts in the middle of the 20th century. The first electronic-spatial environment that combines architecture, film, light, and music into a fusion of space and time is the Philips-Pavilion, that was realized 1958 in Brussels. The artistic direction was at Le Corbusier in co-operation with Iannis Xenakis and Edgard Varèse. Compositions of acoustic space and architecture, light behavior and image generation, aesthetic qualities and perception properties and digital technologies led to new synthesis. Golo Föllmer describes the Philips Pavilion: “Two tape compositions were created for this: “Poème électronique” by Edgard Varèse which aimed at an intensive fusion of space and sound experience. The used synthetic and concrete sounds were shown to Le Corbusier ‘s film or light projection with the help of elaborate loudspeaker technology as lines and volumes in the space.” In the 21st century, the transmedia interplay was expanded by generative data systems by artists like joeressen+kessner.
Since 2001, Eva-Maria Joeressen and Klaus Kessner have been working together developing transmedia compositions as spatial interventions. Both are professional artists since the 1980s and both are active teachers: Klaus Kessner has been visiting lecturer at University of Applied Sciences Duesseldorf and the Peter-Behrens-School of Arts and Eva-Maria Joeressen holds a professorship at the Peter-Behrens-School of Arts in Duesseldorf. In addition, she is involved in the German “Light in Fine Arts (LIFA)” – network to strengthen research and discourse on light in fine arts in higher educations.
Ursula Handleigh is one of the participating artists in the first edition of //RESPONSIVE International Light Art Project Halifax. Her work is on display at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
//Ursula Handleigh grew up in an intercultural family, her parents came from England and from the Philippines to live in Canada. The disconnection from the cultural heritage of her parents has become a driving force in Handleigh’s artistic research. Her families’ archive is an inspiration for her artistic inquiries and articulation. “I look at the images of my parents’ families and I find myself unattached – because I cannot link it to any memory or sense of place and many of the narratives are still foreign to me. I found myself in front of this wall of missing experience and missing emotion as a kind of tentative being in the world.” These images and narratives from unknown realms that sharpened the radar for all kinds of reflections on post memory, collective memory and identity.
Handleigh’s artistic research is directed to observation, exercises and studies that give space to subconscious activity. It is rooted in the understanding of the subconscious as the archive of memories, beliefs, habits, preferences and drives. By longhand writing, relaxed to the point of illegible suggestion, with streams of consciousness, she develops her materials. With traces of writings, presumed truths, and the residue of photographs, she is mapping her findings, sorted in rows, sections and grids.
Houda Ghorbel and Wadi Mhiri is one of the participating artists’ teams in the first edition of //RESPONSIVE International Light Art Project Halifax. Their work can be seen at Anna Leonowens Gallery.
//Houda Ghorbel and Wadi Mhiri are working as an artistic tandem of different backgrounds encompassing professional practice in fine art, design, architecture and community work. They are dedicated to sociocultural and political, religious and philosophical issues. Collective memory and identity, societal coherence and civic engagement, democratic culture and freedom of expression are reoccurring subjects of their artistic research and articulation. They engage themselves in civic society and employ their artistic practice to address critical issues. With their recent intervention “Circle Vicieux” at the “Porte Espagnole” at the La Goulette harbor close to Tunis, they created a strong symbol for all the refugees that lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. To develop iconic imagery, is one of their fortes.
In 2014, they realized their first mutual work using uv-light. “We discovered light as a material that creates focus. In the interplay with white surfaces, these start to glow, and all the other interior of the space fades. We experimented with various materials, worked on shapes and forms. At one point we started to work with dark bluish space as a sculpturing material. We have drawn on walls and we built with white threads across the space … exploring the grammar of light and reflection, color and space. Light makes a space a glowing volume and the reflection of glowing white is a strong impulse to the human eye. We like the minimalism of the material, the minimal invasiveness of the uv-light, the low energy consumption and the extremely interesting esthetical output.” In the recent years, they have become one of the outstanding positions of the reflected use of light in artistic articulation on the African continent.
The mutual works of Houda Ghorbel and Wadi Mhiri include objects, mixed-media installations and context-specific interventions. Since 2012, they work regularly as a team, as a couple, they have been living together for the past 23 years. Houda Ghorbel studied Fine Arts, holds a Ph.D. in Sciences and Artistic Techniques and teaches at the Tunis Art Academy. Since 2004, Wadi Mhiri ’s focus is on photography, earlier he studied Fashion Design in Paris. Both exhibit regularly throughout the Mediterranean and the African Continent. They engage in cooperative and educative environments like the ART MATTERS Collective, an international group of artists and curators that develops new opportunities for context-related art projects in Africa and Europe.
Mischa Kuball is one of the participating artists in the first edition of //RESPONSIVE International Light Art Project Halifax. His work is on display at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
//Kuball ’s works encompass objects, installations and interventions that reflect on visual organization, its impact on consciousness and on outlook onto the world. His works can be found in white cubes and black boxes, in all kinds of exhibitions spaces as well as in public spaces; they can be temporary as well as permanent. With an interdisciplinary approach joining artistic, scientific, social and political aspects, his works respond to the complex dynamics of societal, ethical and esthetical organization. One of his referential features is the quoting and recontextualization of cultural icons. Another is, that many of his interventions are conditioned on the participation of the audience to interact with the artistic setting. He furthers the idea that Robert Irwin coined as “Conditional Art”: The idea is not for work for a place or a context, but of making it itself the material and the object of artistic processing.
Kuball’s works in public space interfere with the co-constitutional process of public scope, public values and public practice. They are statements contributing to the ongoing negotiations between public space, political culture and civic responsibility. Unlike László Moholy-Nagy who was fascinated by the scale of lighting fixtures and translated his proposals for stage into urban environment and unlike Nikolas Schoeffer who experimented with “lumino-dynamic” systems in public space, point of departure for Kuball is a conceptual idea. One of the reoccurring parameters of his artistic settings is the reflected impact of light.
He has been working with light as a building, as a drawing (like photo- and videography) and as a performative material. His artistic research is geared to the relevance of light in contemporary visual codes and their implications. He refers to signature qualities of light like non-locality and time flow, intermediality and perception-responsiveness. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, worldwide a growing number of artists works on light as the medium governing the visual sphere. Instead of working with materials like marble, canvas or bronze, the medium hosting the artwork advanced to the center of artistic interest. Due to his extended oeuvre and the continuous, long-term international display, Mischa Kuball has become a leading voice in Europe. He holds a professorship at the University of Media Arts in Cologne, he is engaged in the development of the “Center for International Light Art” in Unna/Ruhr and, along with Otto Piene and Brigitte Kowanz, he is one of the awardees of the “German Light Art Award” by the Art Museum Celle.
molitor & kuzmin is one of the participating artists’ teams in the first edition of //RESPONSIVE International Light Art Project Halifax. Their work can be seen at Dalhousie School of Architecture.
Fluorescent tubes are used as a kind of drawing material to structure their luminous spheres. In the artistic compositions of molitor & kuzmin, they can hang freely in a space as singled objects or they can come in bulk. They can be organized in a geometric order like in an explosion drawing or they can be framed by transport materials such as pallets, lorries or boxes that contain a dense, disordered number of fixtures. “Fluorescent light is such a re­strictive medium and overtime, we developed a particular appreciation that drives us to continue to work with it. These tubes have their own poetics. The gas at the inside is set to a high vacuum state to cause a discharge phenomenon similar to the origin of the universe. May-be we sense that when we look at them…”.
molitor & kuzmin encompass the open dynamics of presence and absence, visibility and materiality, perception and representation that are present in all fugitive media. Their radiant works immediately captivate the attention as the centerpiece of an immersive environment. They take the visual lead in a space due to the natural ocular response to navigate to the brightest part of an environment. “To date, we are still fascinated by the pure, bright, white light of the fluorescent tubes. It alters a space and everything in it.” The bodies of light come as a raster on a wall, as an object in an environment or as a structure in a space. molitor & kuzmin don’t alter or manipulate neither form, nor color, nor do they hide the electrical cables. Everything that is used is shown as well. The technical transparency is part of the esthetical approach that doesn’t aim to represent anything else than itself. “We are very concrete in our way of working”.
When a site turns into an artistic material and at the same time becomes its objective, then the US-American artist Robert Irwin calls it “Conditional Art”. Conditional Art, according to Irwin, is responsive to its environment, and its objective is to enhance a viewer’s perception of a space. Irwin considers his light interventions to be tools with which he examines “the quality of a particular space in terms of its weight, its temperature, its tactileness, its density, its feel”. Irwin is part of the artistic movement that started in the 1960s, mainly in the USA and Europe. Referring to natural and to artificial light, artists created immersive environments and experimented with ocular responses, visual perception and optical illusions. They composed with the interplay of light, time, space and included explorations of the limits of human perception.
Hartung and Trenz is one of the participating artists’ teams in the first edition of //RESPONSIVE International Light Art Project Halifax. Their works can be seen at Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and at the Memorial Library of Halifax.
//We are interested in sites and contexts that are charged with history and where visual traces are limited or missing. We like to learn and to understand what shaped a site and what didn’t leave a touch. And we are looking for both, the parts that are visible as well as the parts that are neglected, ignored or forgotten. We enjoy this discovery mode and we back it up with research, with reading and with talking to people that link to the site or the context.
When approaching a new project, we start to ask a lot of questions and in the same way and the same time, we explore the interplay of the site and the possibilities of projection. And the better both work, the more information and associations surface and the more questions dive up. Usually the midst of this entanglement becomes our working ground. From there, where we are not sure to understand anything, we start to develop our works. Therefore, they are a moment of observation, an invitation to see and to discuss rather than a judgmental statement.
Making art is articulating a subjective position and part of the research is to understand ourselves. What are we looking for? Why are we interested? How do we refer to? What do we choose? What can we see? Can esthetics and poetics help to see more? In our case, we are always two and we are working together for almost 20 years. Exchange, discussion and synchronization are essential for our work. This means that we are well trained to be in dialogue, with each other as well as with a site or a context. We should come to an agreement, otherwise there is no work. This is a demanding and stimulating process, not always easy and fun, but very good for our attitudes and for our works. And very giving for our personal and artistic development.
Throughout our researches, we learned to be open to information. We never treat a volume of information as a final one, but as a temporary only. We are aware of all the limitations of time, of accessibility, of interest and the difficulties that raise from that. We learned to live with open amounts of data and with the risk of overlooking certain aspects. It corresponds with our interest in language in spoken and written form. All languages have their own gaps – there are parts of what can be addressed and then there are all other ones that cannot. Typography tries to reflect that in shaping letters and letter-spacing. In our esthetic research, we try to build porous surfaces that leave space to include unseen, unsaid and unwritten aspects.
Working with projection allows us to experiment with typographic properties at any site. The interplay of a landscape or an urban environment and the architecture of typography is an esthetical exciting process and often has an ethical impact. In our works, we share our interest and process with a context or a site. We open our dialogue and we follow the development of the process and the encounter. That is what we call artistic research. And at one point of this process we start to respond to what we see, what we learn and what we experience.
Our works are mainly temporary interventions, they are just a moment in time, but very concentrated ones. All sites of our works became part of us, of our experiences, of our memory and of our rhizome of emotions. And we hope to share that with our hosts – the curators and producers – as well as with our visitors.
Kurt Laurenz Theinert is one of the participating artists in the first edition of //RESPONSIVE International Light Art Project Halifax. His performances will take place at St. David’s Church.
//My understanding of light is rooted in photography _ designing photographs, taking them and making them, all processes are light-related and they taught me the edges, the needs and possibilities of visuality. The deeper my understanding grew, the more I wanted to share this experience – the process of appearance and disappearance or or of the “happening” – with others, of course with artists and curators but as well as with an attentive audience. About eight years ago, I started a series of performances that has been taken me around the world.
With some conceptual and engineering support, I developed the visual piano, an instrument that allows me to play with light, shape and color in space and time. The idea was not new, there is a great tradition of color-and-sound playing instruments. I don’t know how far back we can trace it in history, but I was inspired by the early ideas that have been developed in the 16th Century or when I heard about the French monk Louis Bertrand Castel in the 18th Century who proposed the idea of a “Clavecin pour les Yeux”. In the 1920s, Danish-born Thomas Wilfred coined the word “lumia” to describe this from of artistic expression. He developed a series of instruments and with the later ones, he could even project colored imagery and not just fields of colored light as with his earlier instruments. In Germany, from the late 1920s to early 1930s, several color organs were demonstrated at a series of Color Music Congresses. At one of these, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack performed his “Farbenlichtspiel” on a color organ that he had developed at the Weimar Bauhaus school in conjoint efforts with Kurt Schwerdtfeger. Looking at the many versions of color organs, we can see that I was not the only one, but that there was a broad artistic interest throughout the centuries to explore the esthetics of the frequencies of light and sound. My visual piano is a version based on digital controls and is still unique in the world.
Playing is for me an entire abstract process, there is no conceptual thought, no guiding idea and no meaning applied, I just want to explore the dynamics and esthetics of the interconnectedness of light, space, time, the music and me. It always is an effort to understand a space I order to find the perfect set up – its surfaces, its ratios, its echo and its frequencies. I enjoy this time of approaching because I discover a space with its visible and invisible properties. It becomes a partner and a counterpart at the same time because everything I do is changed by the space _ the projected light gets stopped by a wall, the shapes are reformed by the surrounding architecture and the projected colors are mixing with body colors of the projection grounds. All these aspects are my orchestra and wherever I go, every compound has its own constitution. The colors and shapes I generate are not preset, I develop them on the spot and can alter them whenever I see new options of how to communicate with a space.
My artistic research is dedicated to the interplay of all the components and the performative aspects is very important for that. Everything is changing all the time and still, we consider color as something permanent and a material shape as eternal, although we know that nothing is forever – including ourselves. I focus more on dynamics than on materials and learn more about systems than on objects. And I just like to celebrate this complexity.
Where ever I go, I try to find musicians to play with. Sound and light have many properties in common and although we are moving in different spheres we can easily connect. I draw a lot of inspiration from the qualities and the behavior of sound and I seek musicians that are interested in the transmedia co-operation. The better they know their instrument and the space, the more we can concentrate on our communication as an esthetical process. Improvisation in music has a long-standing tradition. The creative activity of the in-the-moment-composition acknowledges the qualities of the setting as well as the responsive part of the players. To meet and to improvise together is a great way to get to know each other as well as the space where we meet.
To share these encounters means to share the fragile moment when two systems start to correspond. The openness and transparency includes the audience who is another force in the performance. The presence of people changes the visual and the acoustic qualities of the space and a moving audience is like a third improviser on the set. It is just an amazing experience to connect. I like the challenge of improvisation that reminds us to be present.
The Center of International Light Art Unna (de) is sharing an exhibition copy of one of the seventeen permanent works in their collection.
//When I was asked how I felt about showing Mischa Kuball’s installation “Space, Speech, Speed” during RESPONSIVE in Halifax, I immediately said yes! I believe it is important that as many people as possible get acquainted with light art and its specific place within contemporary art, which is why we, the Center for International Light Art in Unna, Germany, wish to work together with institutions and cities all over the world.
The original of “Space, Speech, Speed” can be seen in our museum, which happens to be the only light art museum worldwide, that is fully dedicated to light art. Mischa installed his light art sculpture in the museum right at the beginning in 2001, and up till now it evokes a very enthusiastic response. You will notice during RESPONSIVE that light art has this special quality, that it responds to all our senses.
What is special about our museum is that every artist picked his or her own exhibition space, and then made a site-specific installation for the 12 meters underground spaces, where once beer was stored and cooled, at the time the museum still was a brewery. Mischa installed his work in one of the former ice cellars! Besides our permanent collection, we also host temporary exhibitions, like ¡BRIGHT!, which will open on next November 24th.
In 2015, the museum initiated the International Light Art Award, ILAA, a biennial competition, where artists can hand in their concepts for light art installations, that show how the future of light art, given all the rapid technological developments, might look like. Last September, we ended the second edition of ILAA and its accompanying exhibition, for which we received almost 300 concepts from artists from 41 countries. Keith Sonnier (look him up!) was the jury’s chairman. ILAA is a means for us to emphasize the importance of light art, and to give a chance to emerging artists, that want to work with light as their prime material.
As a competence center for light art, we think it is important to collaborate with universities, museums, light expertise centers, and of course artists that work with light worldwide. That is also why it is important to be visible in Halifax as well, with Mischa’s wonderful and triggering installation.
I wish Halifax and all visitors to RESPONSIVE a truly enlightening experience.
//RESPONSIVE is a new art in public space format, that first took place in Halifax from October 18 to 21, 2017. A series of artworks were installed, scattered around the downtown core. Located both inside and outside, the works was free to the public – after sunset – from 7.00 pm to midnight.
RESPONSIVE is dedicated to the reflected use of light in fine arts. All of the selected artworks use physical light as material, medium or metaphor. In contemporary artistic practices, physical light is used for drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, intervention, and performance. In their research, artists reflect on the interplay of materials and the connotations of their appearances, form and colour, light and shadow, space and time, and all types of phenomenological aspects and their semantic implications. These types of artworks are designed to be dynamic systems of interdependence. They explore the interchange between material aspects and optical properties, the conditions of human perception, and codes of content.
Peter Dykhuis, Director/ Curator of the Dalhousie Art Gallery at Dalhousie University, and Melanie Colosimo, Director/ Curator of the Anna Leonowens Gallery Systems at NSCAD University, are the founding Halifax partners and will work closely with Bettina Pelz and Dr. Ralf Seippel, their curatorial counterparts from Cologne, Germany. Ralf Seippel, the initiator and architect of this initiative, has been developing sustainable art and art mediation projects around the world. Bettina Pelz, in the role of Artistic Director, is a curator with focus on light in fine arts and has founded several international light art projects and has fostered a global research network on light in fine arts. In addition to Peter Dykhuis and Melanie Colosimo, Sarah Fillmore, Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, has joined the curatorial team along with assistance of Jamie MacLellan, Public Art Facilitator for the Halifax Regional Municipality and Christine Macy, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at Dalhousie University, as consultants. The Halifax partners gratefully acknowledge the financial support of RESPONSIVE in 2017 and 2019 by Probst & Partner Investments Ltd of Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

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