RADICAL LIGHT – ELEMENTS IV & VI – Capitalism in the Public Realm

ELEMENTS I – X : A NEON SCULPTURE INSTALLATION SERIES

RADICAL LIGHT I, 2020 and II, 2021, are two sequential monumental light and sound environments that address the ephemeral sculpturality and the transformative potentials of the color white, set in two former military purpose buildings in countries that were formerly occupied, today autonomous European countries, where the former military industrial buildings have been transformed into contemporary art centers, serving culture and the public. The sensorial, minimalist neon light sculptures are a meditation on topologies of the indestructible and sublime. In concert with the light sculptures, a hypnotic, vast enveloping sound space moves through particles and electric currents, created for the installation by acclaimed composer JG Thirlwell. Radical Light I constitutes the art work ELEMENTS IV and The Sensory Chamber IV, 2020, Radical Light II, constitutes the art work ELEMENTS VI and The Sensory Chamber VI, 2021.

RADICAL LIGHT II – ELEMENTS VI + The Sensory Chamber VI, 2021. Video created by Seinajoki Kunsthall/Samuli Kuusisto.

I have broken the blue boundary of color limits, come out into the white; beside me comrade-pilots swim in this infinity. I have established the semaphore of Suprematism. I have beaten the lining of the colored sky, torn it away and in the sack that formed itself, I have put color and knotted it. Swim! The free white sea, infinity, lies before you.

Kasimir Malevich. 1919

The World is Large but in us it is deep as the Sea.

R. M. Rilke, ca 1903

Contemplating Rilke’s quote in The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard explores the daydream as a philosophical category bearing the mark of infinity, beyond the material immensities of Earth. In his essay on Suprematism, Malevich appeals to the revolutionary as a mode by which to explore the phenomenology of perception and interpret the identifiable non-object as experience. Senstad’s immersive light sculpture environment is an invitation to encounter a perceptual and sensorial taxonomy of light and sound in pure form. In Radical Light Senstad examines the transformational potentials of experiential space and ethereal topologies.

By way of light the installation structuralizes the inhabited observational space where light expands providing contradictions of form, perspective and the ultrafinite as representation of a non-objective world, pursuing what lies beyond the observable to find truths in nullification and antimatter.

Coupled with the central work, Senstad has created a sensory antechamber where the viewer enters into an immersive experience, a new video projection installation merged with the element of salt as an exploration of dimensionality, nature and material. In observing immateriality and the experiential domain of the senses through re-materialization into form and origin, the very same light and color immateriality creates the substance of the molecular surfaces objectifying and materializing that which cannot be held and re organizing light and color into folds of the physical, the ephemeral into entity and a phoneme shaping of time. (excerpt from the exhibition text)