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Diana Thater

Abyss of Light

Abyss of Light is divided into three screens and into three acts, the traditional structure of classic narrative film. In the first act, all the images synchronize to form a single panorama of Bryce Canyon in Utah. In the second, the screens break away from one another into three parallel sequences wherein each projection shows the same one hundred images at different speeds. In the third, all three images synchronize once again to form a single wrapping panorama of Death Valley, California. The work is an ode to the American western, one of my favorite film genres. Despite my admiration, however, my desire is not to imitate westerns. Instead, I set up an abstraction in opposition to the idea of narrative, something that can be seen in all of my work. In Abyss of Light, continuous disruptions of the American landscape document my refusal to see the land as backdrop for man’s heroic conquering of the wild; instead I see it as a foreground, a subject to be contemplated for itself and for which wildness is a state of grace.

toyo ito

تويو ايتو
伊东丰雄
טויו איטו
伊東豊雄
도요 이토
Palladian Basilica
This is the imagery evoked by Ito at the Palladian Basilica: “The austere hall has dissolved into a fluid volume, inside which float luminous and almost vital algae for the dozens of visitors who “swim” and group around, like fish in a fluorescent abyss, or in an urban “aquarium” “.

NANINE LINNING

BACON

He painted the abysses of the human soul: the British artist Francis Bacon. Basic mechanisms of relationships such as desire, domination and exclusion he presented with merciless honesty and painful beauty.
With her piece, Nanine Linning fathoms the emotional cosmos of Bacon`s paintings and detects in their uncompromising depiction an analogy with her own art. With excessive physicality, the choreography explores fundamental patterns of behavior, which blur the line between human and feral bearing by their archaic and merciless nature. From an almost disturbing proximity the spectator witnesses the struggle of the individual for affiliation.At the same time fascinating and disturbing, the piece celebrates its comeback on stage fourteen years after its first release. BACON, which received the »Swan« for the best Dutch choreography, returns with revised choreography and new video- and light design.

PAUL CHAN

1st light

Paul Chan’s work summons the darkness that envelops us despite the greedy illumination of our cities. Evoking our world on the verge of disintegration, it celebrates the light that emerges in too much light.
The fight is no longer the fight between day and night that inaugurates Murnau’s Faust, but that between the light of the spirit and the light of things. In this shadow theater, under the auspices of a telegraph pole shaped like the Golgotha ​​cross, we witness the rise of the objects of our consumerist societies.
Phones, I-Pods, scooters, whole trains rise to the sky, saved, as the shadows of men fall, hurled to the abyss, like the suicide bodies of “September 11” victims falling from burning towers.
The image, gradually modified along the continuum of projection, carries with it the prophecies of the Apocalypse rehashed by American fundamentalist movements, and the obvious disgrace of a society that celebrates its materialist cult.