Radical Light Kai Art Center

The video clip is an outtake from a 20 min doc video by Stella Saarts for Kai Art Center on Anne Katrine Senstad's monumental and immersive sculptural light installation on the essence of perception, elements of purification, and the sensorial experiences of space, entitled Radical Light. The experiential light environment is defined by sets of matrices and an enveloping horizon and accompanied by en enveloping infinite composition by acclaimed composer JG Thirlwell. 


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Radical Light - Anne Katrine Senstad 

Exhibition open from January 26 – April 26, 2020

Kai Art Center is proud to present a new large-scale light installation by renowned Norwegian artist Anne Katrine Senstad, created especially for the newly opened art center in Port Noblessner in Tallinn, Estonia.

Senstad’s immersive light sculpture environment is an invitation to encounter the perceptive sensations of light and sound in pure form and their transformational effect on the experience of space. Constructed of neon lights, the unique luminal properties effect our cognitive system where the artificiality of LED lights fall short. As one of Senstad’s largest indoor works to date, the light sculpture is conceived as a monument and a matrix – a vast spectral light sphere which allows the public to experience being enveloped in the radiance of light of the highest spectrums when wandering through the historic former submarine factory housing the 450m2 exhibition space.

With a unique sound environment composed specifically for Radical Light by acclaimed composer JG Thirlwell, spatial audio arrangements engulf the space in luminous sounds in pure form. Senstad has collaborated with Thirlwell on numerous occasions since 2000, most notably Senstad’s solo exhibition during the 56th Venice biennale in 2015, The Vanity of Vanities.

While the exhibition takes place from January through April during some of the darkest months in Estonia, the immense light sculpture illuminates the dark season of the northern hemisphere.

The film and lecture program accompanying the exhibition opens an important chapter in the history of art – from the late 1960s to early 1970s – inspired by minimalist and land art and represented by a number of famous American artists such as Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Walter de Maria, Doug Wheeler and James Turrell. Films will include Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art (2015), Spiral Jetty (1970) and Sun Tunnels (1978).

The film program will begin with Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art (2015, by James Crump) on February 5th and 19th at 6pm at Kai cinema. The screenings of Sun Tunnels and Spiral Jetty will take place on March 4th and 18th.

Kai Art Center offers guided tours at the exhibition in Estonian, English, Russian, Finnish, Swedish and German. Please contact us to book a tour.

Read an essay about the exhibition written by prof. Andres Kurg in English, Finnish or Russian.

Supporters: Viru Keskus, Utilitas, Royal Norwegian Embassy in Estonia, NBK/Vederlags fondet, Norway 

Special thanks to: ABC Motors, AkzoNobel, JAA Disain, Proplastik, Põhjala Brewery, Red Hat Group Design, Valge Klaar

The Sensory Chamber - Kai Art Center

A short video by Stella Saarts for Kai Art Center with a short interview by Anne Katrine Senstad on her installation the Sensory Chamber as part of the solo exhibition Radical Light at Kai Art Center.

Eternity

- Arthur Rimbaud, 1872

It has been found again.

What? – Eternity.

It is the sea fled away 

With the sun

Sentinel soul,

Let us whisper the confession 

Of the night full of nothingness 

And the day on fire.

From humain approbation,

From common urges

You diverge here

And fly off as you may.

Since from you alone,

Satiny embers,

Duty breathes 

Without anyone saying: at last.

Here is no hope,

No orietur.

Knowledge and fortitude,

Torture is certain.

It has been found again.

What? – Eternity.

It is the sea fled away

With the sun.

The Sensory Chamber installation contains a video projection of the video work Beckoned to Blue in seven colors onto a bed of salt and sound composed for the installation in dialogue with the spatial light environment and neon sculpture installation Elements IV that constitutes Senstad's solo exhibition Radical Light at Kai Art Center in Tallinn, Estonia. The colors travel through red, blue, green, white, black, pink and teal and go through mesmerizing monochrome glitched and sparkled spaces into compositions of expanding lines and circles reflecting our inner space confined in our bodies and minds, yet echoes the infinite vastness of space, the universe, time, awareness of self, our emotive and cognitive system. While the video is projected onto a bed of salt, a component found in almost all things known, an element of the human constitution and represents the solidity of the earth and ocean, a grounding element - the whiteness of the salt reflects the projected colors while offering a materiality. The composition created especially for Radical Light is by acclaimed composer JG Thirlwell and accompanies all spaces of the large scale installations in the former submarine factory built by the last Tsar of the Russian Empire in 1911, enveloping the visitor in a sound space reflecting the  infinity of light, elements of electricity and nobility of neon gasses.

Kultuurimeeter - "Radikaalne valgus" Kai kunstikeskuses

Radical Light - Kai Art Center Jan 26 - April 26, 2020

Photos: ©Kai Art Center, Anne Katrine Senstad and Rene Altrov, 2020

HYPERBOREA - Freight + Volume Gallery

Freight+Volume is pleased to announce Hyperborea an exhibition of  recent work by interdisciplinary artist Anne Katrine Senstad.  Reflecting a deep engagement with various avant-garde movements,  including the Neo-Concrete group of Brazil and California’s Light and Space movement, Senstad’s work is underscored by a fixation with  properties of form, sound and color, and specifically their overlap,  the neurological phenomenon of “synesthesia”, wherein neural  pathways signaling sensory experience are crossed and fused.  In her first showing at the gallery, the artist presents a series of  photographic works depicting precisely arranged, hard-edged  planar forms along with neon sculptures and video installations;  despite their apparent grounding in the realm of formal  abstraction, Senstad’s pieces are set apart by an enigmatic,  ethereal character and ephemerality that runs throughout  her practice in all mediums. Working with the most elemental  qualities of color, light and form, she corporealizes them into  mirage-like objects that quiver between representation and  perceptual experience, querying the inevitable slippage  amongst our simultaneous systems of perception, sensory  experience, and rational cognition. Senstad frequently works with text, and in Forget Flavin, first  exhibited at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, she  integrates her work with light and deconstruction of perception  into an “ironic insult” to the established hierarchy of art history.  The issue of the over-representation of male artists is of special  significance to Senstad, who observes a particular dearth of  female artists within the spheres of Minimalism, Land Art, and  the Light and Space movement. Eschewing LED lights and other artificial materials, Senstad has  long used neon heavily in her practice, noting its uncanny formal  qualities and literal otherworldly nature, existing in abundance in  the earth’s atmosphere and outer space. Recalling the utopian,  quasi-mystical roles and participatory models imparted upon  abstract geometric constructions by artists throughout the  20th century, perhaps best expressed in the "Manifesto of the  Neo-Concrete," stating their desire to “use phenomenology to  create art that expresses complex human realities”, as well as  the experiments in sensory deprivation undertaken by Robert  Irwin and other Light and Space movement artists, the works in  Hyperborea transmute raw sensory data into evocative  constructions that are often oddly specific and deja-vu like;  regarding Beckoned to Blue and Red, two video installations  in which flickering projections of grain and grit against modulating  washes of color stimulate the movement of gaseous neon particles,  Senstad notes their similarity to the “Prisoner’s Cinema” phenomenon,  or when as a child, one would push their fingers against their eyes  to produce dots and patterns. Senstad’s relationship with color is  exacting, with particular tonal juxtapositions imparting a sort of  ambient consciousness upon the works, further blurring the lines  between abstraction, materiality, and reality, situating Hyperborea  in a nether-space between the organic and artificial.  Two freestanding neon sculptures, Portal for Perpetuity I and II,  display the nuances of the artist’s illusive ability. Fashioned of  neon and transparent mirrors, Senstad describes them as “inverted  black holes”, objects of seemingly infinite expanse yet having restrained  physical bounds. Their respective color pairings (one of red and  blue neon, the other pink and yellow) amplify this notion of  sheathed potential energy. In her photo-based work, the artist explores similar overlaps between  color and sensory perception. Depicting a hot pink gradient on a  skewed plane, one piece from Senstad’s large-scale Color  Kinesthesia series is on display; captured as a still from another  video piece (the artist frequent recapitulates past formal devices),  the hyper-saturated and gradated fuschia tones appear both  reflective and diffusive, as if flickering between a physical  photograph and a window cut to reveal a pink void. Similarly,  an otherworldly inner energy emanates from her Concrete  Planes series. Consisting of geometric arrangements of  hard-edged triangular forms in carefully selected pairings of  color, they call attention to the constant tension between  physicality and perception, especially the atmospheric spaces  and slippages between the two wherein the brain fills in its  own hallucinatory simulacra. Organized into triptych and diptych  formations, they reflect Senstad’s sensitivity to the fault lines of  perception and illusion, as she weaves them into a discourse  of color, light, and form. A full-color, limited edition artist book will be available for purchase at the gallery or online.  For more information, please contact nick@freightandvolume.com, ashley@freightandvolume.com, or call 212.691.7700

RADICAL LIGHT - KAI Art Center

IMMERSIVE WORLD - Trailer

IMMERSIVE WORLD - a new Arts and Culture series in 10 episodes that was first aired on Arte 1 TV in Brazil in November 2019 - and will be shown on All Arts TV, a New York PBS station in March and April 2020. The series is streamed nationwide in the US free of cost after the published date of each episode. 

As part of Immersive World my work is presented in Episode 9, April 18th, 2020 showing works from my sculptural light environment installation series that has been exhibited in New York at SL Gallery (2019) , in Saudi Arabia (2018) alongside James Turrell, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Robert Irwin and Leo Villarreal in partnership with Pace Gallery and Cruz-Diez foundation), and in Estonia at Kai Art Center and upcoming in Norway(fall 2020) and is featured in the TV Series alongside Dan Flavin/DIA Art Foundation, Anthony McCall, The New Museum and more. 

Created and produced by NYC based Producing Partners.