FINDER
Loke Berg’s intervention in the Bachelor exhibition is as conceptually spectacular as it is almost imperceptible. The artist idea was to make a hole in the exhibition space wall, in order to bring the light from the outside into the room, that has no window, and then — using a set of custom made stands and mirrors — to guide the light from one point of the room to another. The relation between the evanescence of light, its lightness, its fluidity and the heaviness, the complexity and the amount of time, research and energy to make the work happen makes this piece as poetic as it is absurd. After a while, when I understood what the idea of the piece was, I was amazed, each mirror had been transformed and each metal structure was kind of tailormade. It made me think of a child’s dream, the reverie of a person who’s fascinated by light and its movement, that in the end revealed the materiality of it, its plasticity, it’s sculptural capacities. I thought it was a kind of magic. Then, Loke mentioned that the idea came from an archival picture dating from the WWII, and I realised that actually the artist’s work is also referring to visual research. If light is an « infinite material » in this work, it is also revealed through a complex mechanics, that is as obsessive as it is empirical. It is also a great example of collaborative practice as the artist managed to get help from experts when needed, and paid a nice homage to the kind of art that is not named, the one of the mechanics, the one of the engineer. We talked about Gordon Matta-Clark and readings of the archive, how to use light today in another way, perhaps less technological, mystical, and more direct, DIY, hands-on and free...