Capitalism in the Public Realm

ELEMENTS I – X : A NEON SCULPTURE INSTALLATION SERIES

Inaugural launch and Exhibition of TEMPORAL SPACES January 16th, 2025 – The Pink Room Has No Walls – ELEMENTS VIII (2025) by Anne Katrine Senstad with a sound environment by acclaimed composer JG Thirlwell. Supported by The Royal Norwegian Consulate General New York.

Temporal Spaces is an artist organized curatorial platform founded in 2025, that transforms the built environment, vernacular domestic spaces, infrastructure and communities into living art works, chiefly by invitation. For the inaugural exhibition, Temporal Spaces inhabited a 4 story building located on Dimes Square in New York, between Chinatown, Two Bridges, and the Lower East side.

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The inaugural exhibition, entitled Temporal Spaces, encompasses the totality of a historic building over a period of 3 months. Opening January 16th 2025, Temporal Spaces presents an exhibition and participatory program that transforms a building into a conjunctural artwork, – an illuminated, site-specific, communal work.The metabolic potentials of art as the lived, transformative experience, allows for the built environment to connect objects, phenomena, and meanings with community. Within these ideas, Temporal Spaces presents it’s potentials as a conceptual representation housing personal and shared histories in dialogue with a diversity of lineages of interconnected human value systems. Temporal Spaces considers aesthetic representation in light of authenticity, the humanities and social rights, contextualized with the socio-demographic and psychographic – historic site 40°42’52.5″N 73°59’28.9″W

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On Floor 3, Anne Katrine Senstad presents a new iteration in her neon installation series, ELEMENTS, entitled The Pink Room Has No Walls – Elements VIII (2025), accompanied by an audio environment by acclaimed composer JG Thirlwell. The neon installation, can be entered through the conceptual, structural, and perceptual, – a site specific, spatially transformative light sculpture. The art work invites the viewer to encounter inner mechanics of sensory experience, electricity and noble gases, the nature of our physiology, and the phenomena of an illusionary space of vertical topology. Here, in this room, the novelty of saturated monochromatic pink is experienced as a transformed domestic habitat, now defined by suspended lines in space that alters the concept of the personal, lived chamber, through spectrums of light, color and sound.

With this new work, the artist returns to the color pink in a new reincarnated form. Senstad has a long relationship with the color. Pink was the subject of her 2 city solo exhibition Light Writes Always in Plural,(2007), respectively Houston and New York, and is a reoccurring ingredient of her numerous site-specific and land art works. The title The Pink Room Has No Walls, stems from one of 8 neon text works in English and Chinese, from her solo exhibition Light Words White Neon, at Zendai MoMa, Shanghai, (2008), which contextualized the public realm and the autonomous freedom of mind, through the poetry of light and words.

In 2010, Senstad’s critical installation work DIASPORA USA, was on view at Roger Smith Hotel Gallery, New York. The installation was a reformatting and new iteration of Senstad’s Hurricane Katrina site specific light installation The Light House at KK Projects in New Orleans during Prospect 1 (2008). Senstad created an all pink version of the original blue The Light House, here, housing a multimedia installation, including video projections of the video trilogy Light Writes Always in Plural – Light Displacement – Section I-III (2007-2009), found objects from displaced families, and remnants of personal and societal loss. The work is a response to the total lack of governmental responsibility and it’s failure in light of the social contract, in times of disaster and crises.

Senstad employs pink as pure subject. Pink light becomes matter, neon and argon gases, glass tubes, color frequencies, and pigment create an ephemeral time-based work. The color pink carries connotations of an anti-color-color, a hybrid existing in botany, or in the Arctic hemisphere as atmospheric electromagnetic fields, a color with innumerable hues made up by a variation of cross-pollinations of white and red, and a dash of cyan, or yellow. It is reminiscent of euphoric realms, and holds a sensation of retreat from time and reality, it inhabits the limitless and borderless.

Likewise, pink is ornamental, as in Senstad’s words, “the art work’s aesthetic language presented as monochromatic pink sculpture appears as a contradiction which allows for the idea of Baroque Minimalism to exist as representation”, in which Senstad creates a cosmology as both commentary to and a distinct separation from codes of the current zeitgeist.

In Robert Smithson’s text ULTRAMODERNE(1967), he embarks on the phenomena of a state beyond reality found in critical times of illusion: “The Ultramoderne in the ‘thirties, transcends Modernist ‘historicistic’ realism and naturalism, and avoids the avant-garde categories of painting, sculpture, and architecture.” Bridging to Senstad’s reference to the Baroque maximalist epoque through minimalism with Smithson’s essayistic window into phantasmagoric aesthetics of the 1930’s through Modernism, we find a union in the parallel universes built on “ideas that could only have originated in the illusory depths of The Mirror of Mirrors.”

Senstad has carefully chosen pink hues, and manipulated these with scientific craft to enhance cognitive alterations within the viewer. When the body is exposed to the full impact of color spectra by use of specific UV behavioral frequencies present in variable hues of the color pink, the artwork alters perceptual space, and potentially the viewers interior climate. In old-school cinema and photography, pink light and filters are known as beautifying, enhancing all beneficial complexions and surfaces, while nullifying errors and trauma.

The pink room is enveloped by windows allowing for the outside world to participate in the work, Chinatown neon signage, busy restaurants and apartment buildings, where clear blue daytime sky or grey days are altered by chromatic pink, turning the outside world green. The busy city night-time presents a sequence of darkened, reflected window-portals with city infrastructure and utilitarian lights of commerce. Viewed from the exterior, the illuminated 4 story historic house appears to the by-passer as an art work in totality, the domestic house has been transformed.

Temporal Communal Spaces: Located on Floor 4, Temporal Spaces invites the public into the former 1900’s photo studio transformed into a performative space and gallery of text based art, video installation work, and a space dedicated to communal events and happenings. Throughout the 4 month project, Temporal Spaces will host an event series inspired by Senstad’s 2016-2021 project HOW WE LIVE TOGETHER, entitled I LIKE MONDAYS, with performances, readings, sound art, and participatory events. The events are by invitation, unless otherwise advertised.

Temporal Spaces Library: Situated on the 4th floor, Temporal Spaces presents a curated installation of text works by Senstad. HOW WE LIVE TOGETHER (2016-2020) and MAL EDUCACIÓN (2023), which was supported by Office for Contemporary Art Norway.

The 4th floor also presents select books by Senstad: NEON GUIDES ME published by Praun and Guermouche(2022), The Norwegians II, (2015) and The Pink Project, (2007), published by AKS Studio.

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