Watch an interview with artist Kurt Hentschläger, filmed by Alexandra Dementieva specifically for CYLAND MediaArtLab.
Starting on the 25th of March and running until the 23th of May 2021, iMAL presents SUB, the latest installation in a series of 4 spatial environments created by Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger. Set in complete darkness, SUB is an immersive and meditative environment conceived to tingle your senses by skippering between depriving and overloading them. iMAL is bringing the work to Brussels for its European première.
SUB induces a simple yet dramatic perceptual shift: Embarking into pitch black, with the work’s gestalt both initially unsettling and then increasingly hypnotic, you are invited to drift off into an ambiguous state of sensory deprivation and overload. The predominant absence of light in SUB is contrasted, in intervals, by bright bursts of animated abstract forms and patterns. Returning back into darkness, ghostly retinal after-images linger, slowly fading until the next eruption of light. Experiencing SUB makes time and space for a meditative break, a moment of minimized visual sensing without the noise and distraction emitted by a hyper-mediated world.
New York based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger creates media installations and performances for both physical and virtual spaces.
Hentschläger’s works have characteristically been visceral and immersive, as in ZEE, FEED & more recently in SOL, SUB and EKO, and are known for their perceptual effects. They challenge an audience psychologically but also offer a meditative respite from the day-to-day stress of technologically accelerated life. His representational body of work, including MEASURE and ORT, suggests a semi-synthetic nature that serves as a metaphor for our life in the Anthropocene.
Selected presentations include the Venice Biennial, the Venice Theater Biennial, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, PS1 New York, MAC – Musée d’Art Contemporain Montreal, MAK – Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, National Art, ZKM – Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Museum of China Beijing, National Museum for Contemporary Art Seoul, ICC Tokyo, Arte Alameda Mexico City, MONA – Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Sharjah Art, UAE and the Power Station of Art, Shanghai.
Read more: https://www.imal.org/en/events/sub