From 02.09.2023 the project space SCOTTY presents the exhibition CROSSLIGHT. CROSSLIGHT is a light that crosses the path of another light and illuminates what the other leaves in darkness. Crosslight has no direct translation into German. In English, the word refers to illuminating or highlighting different aspects at the same time. Metaphorically, it can mean that something offers additional information or perspectives to see a subject in a new way. It indirectly sheds light on something that can become a source of insight.
Katinka Theis, Benedikt Terwiel and Charlotte Bastian deal with the change and perception of landscape. In the process, information and materials are placed in new perspectives. Thus, both the individual works are characterised by the idea of crosslight, as is the compilation and correspondence of the three positions in this exhibition.
Light plays an essential role in both the figurative and the literal sense.
Abb. oben: Katinka Theis, Nachtmodus, hand-bent neon tubes and landscape model, 2023
In her artistic work, Katinka Theis investigates the effects of architectural spaces. In doing so, she traces the power relationships that are expressed through monumental structures in urban situations and oversized landscapes.
The objects and installations move thematically at the interface of sculpture and architecture. They can be sculptural works as well as visionary architectural models that refer to a form-shaping, superordinate level. She develops her site-specific installations in the respective situation out of the spatial reference. Formal, space-shaping characteristics of the surrounding space play just as important a role as the atmospheric effect of the respective situation.
In the Crosslight exhibition, she shows the installation “Night Mode”, which consists of hand-bent neon tubes and an abstract landscape model. The transparent glass tubes installed under the ceiling of the exhibition space are installed in an energetic relationship to each other, revealing the blue colour spectrum of the gas in the neon tubes, which spreads throughout the space depending on the strength of other light sources. The mood emanating from this makes one think of lightning and weather phenomena, which have a different effect here. For the accompanying abstract landscape model shows, in addition to contour lines, an architecture of curved round rods made of concrete, which in their form and arrangement relate to the light sources and pose the question of a conditional history of origin.
katinkatheis.de
In “Landscape, 2019” by Benedikt Terwiel, white fields, some of which overlap, follow the route of the Hellweg from Berlin to Rotterdam, which the artist walked in 2012, in the aspect ratio of a 16-inch monitor. They show the route as one would scroll along it on a digital map while sitting at a computer. The work is a travelogue, but without any views, impressions or experiences. A disembodied movement on the computer that traces the Hellweg – which, it is assumed, got its name “hell” from the fact that it was kept free of darkening branches – in the sections of a luminous computer display.
Interested in the landscapes of everyday environments, Benedikt Terwiel explores cartographic images and methods. He searches for specific cultural-historical narratives and their conventions of representation and asks how they can be reflected pictorially. As an important point of reference for his work, Terwiel undertook several weeks of walking tours, among others from Bonn to Basel (2009), from Florence to Rome (2010) and most recently – under the title “man’s natural habitat” – from Berlin to Rotterdam (2011), from which the work of the exhibition also emerged.
benediktterwiel.info
In her photo collages and spatial image montages, Charlotte Bastian uses material that she picks up in different places and reassembles. The focus is on changes in landscapes in the Anthropocene.
In the exhibition Crosslight, Bastian shows photomontages of her current series “Glocal Series #5b” in a stereoscope (rotation viewer) and as a wall piece.
The motifs of the series were created with material from a study visit to the province of Buenos Aires (Argentina) at the end of 2022. The landscape there is drastically affected by a flood that lasted a quarter of a century (1985-2009) and the subsequent drought. The flood (caused by the construction of a canal to return water to the salt lakes in the area for maximum tourist use) submerged large areas beyond repair within a week and only receded again from 2009 onwards due to a lack of rainfall – leaving behind devastation in which new things are also germinating.
Presented in the stereoscope as three-dimensionally perceptible montages, the composite photographic motifs create the feeling of being in this precarious, doubly unreal space that one is nevertheless only looking at.
charlotte-bastian.de
WHERE?
SCOTTY – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst und experimentelle Medien, eingetragener Verein
Oranienstraße 46
10969 Berlin
U-Bahnhof Moritzplatz
WHEN?
Opening: Friday 01. September 2023, 19 Uhr
Exhibition: Saturday 02.09. – Saturday 30.09. 2023
Sunday-Friday 15-19 Uhr
Saturday 14-18 Uhr
