About project
A light installation in the shadow of light. Minimalist cinema presents: an electrochromic display. A matrix formed of gleaming kinetics. A diorama of film formed from letters and its surroundings. A projection of epiphanies and their phantoms of the word and world, composed from windows, gates and gatekeepers.
Hidden in the Czech word světlo (light) is the word svět (world). This entices one into artistic exploration, because metaphors and narratives about light as the world’s initiation myths are a primordial theme in religion, philosophy and art. In the digital age they have become themes that pose a challenge for the technocratic understanding of information, and indeed it seems they have become an obscurity. The issues they concern are open once again: What is the relationship between the world and light, the word and light, sense and sensuality? How do they act outside the framework of technocratic-functional and religious-esoteric-political wishes and fears without becoming lost in the shadow of the “light of enlightenment”?
In an electrochromic metamorphosis, which in the installation becomes its own artistic form of effect, the seeming opposites of transparency and opacity, being and non-being, sense and sensuality clash in a surprisingly muted manner without neutralising each other – interplaying with the lights of the city and sky, the remaining darkness in the night and the shadows in the day.
The string of characters S-V-Ě-T-L-O, which in the installation dimly appears and disappears again, can be interpreted as an echo of the neon sign “Mehr Licht!” (More light!), which Signal Festival presented on the facade of the Goethe Institute in Prague in 2020/21. Now the question could be: “More, or less light?”
Does less light, if we technically identify it with information or data, mean that we see the world or ourselves better? Is every light metaphor always obscure?
