"HERE COMES THE SUN"
27 AUGUST–4 DECEMBER 2005

"Here Comes the Sun" is an exhibition on cosmology, time, and our most prominent celestial body. The works will address various aspects of time and its flow. Daniel Birnbaum, Rosa Martínez, Jérôme Sans, and Sarit Shapira, four of the world's most prominent curators, have developed "Here Comes the Sun" together as their first joint project for Magasin 3 where they have been associate curators since 2004.

Pilar Albarracín
Born 1968 in Seville, lives and works in Madrid.
Pilar Albarracín's productions have focused on the analysis of dominant narratives and, specifically, on the clichés that represent Andalusian identity. Folklore and popular traditions, food rituals, religious myths, and women's role in the distribution of power or collective festivals such as bullfighting, are critically reflected in the mirror of her reflections. In the collective ceremony of bullfighting, for example, the sacrifice of the bull and the exhilaration of the festival are associated with offerings to the sun, with unproductive rituals and with the astonishment and the hecatomb of daring to look death in the face. Bullfighting is a mirror and a ceremony, a power game that shows that the sacrifice is, par excellence, an attitude in the face of death since, as Bataille says, "the movement it consists of is a violence which demands proof that death exists. "Tartero" (2004) is a separate sculpture of a stuffed wild bull that presents the animal, the symbol of power and energy, defeated, kneeling and humiliated, but lifting its horns and its gaze in a final, proud and tragic attitude of defiance before death. With this intense and fleeting gesture, the bull proves its nobility in front of the sun while facing the great defeat: the defeat wherein it doesn't matter how death comes, it always comes.

Francis Alÿs
Born 1959 in Antwerp, lives and works in Mexico D.F.
The work, "Zocalo" (1999), documents a flag that stands at the center of the huge square in Mexico City. It casts a shadow that attracts the people who try to escape the relentless light that falls onto the plaza. Thus, a large solar clock is created with human figures as an element. This is an artwork about the Mexican sun, about the movement of planet Earth through space, and about social life in the Mexican capital. In a quote from 1993 Francis Alÿs'describes his thoughts and ways of working "...I spend a lot of time walking around the city... The initial concept for a project often emerges during a walk. As an artist, my position is akin to that of a passer-by constantly trying to situate myself in a moving environment. My work is a succession of notes and guides. The invention of a language goes together with the invention of a city. Each of my interventions is another fragment of the story that I am inventing, of the city that I am mapping."

Ghada Amer
Born 1963 in Cairo, lives and works in New York.
Drawing, sculpture, installations and garden design are an integral part of her work and are pervaded by the same aesthetic and ideological concerns. Despite the differences between her Islamic upbringing and the models of behavior that apply in Western culture, Ghada Amer alludes to universal problems, such as love, sexual desire and the domination of women, which are prevalent in different cultures. In the paintings she has specifically created for the exhibition "Here Comes the Sun", Ghada Amer is referring to an erotic dream she had long ago. The feeling of fulfillment was so strong that she saw herself melting in an ocean of gold. "I was drowning in an immense pond of water and it was all gold. I was trying to get out to breathe and then sinking again. The golden water was very thick and I was falling down deeper and deeper." This dream was a clear metaphor of the sexual embrace where the consciousness of the ego is lost and where darkness and enlightenment become one.

Tacita Dean
Born 1965 in Cantebury, lives and works in Berlin and London.
Through her films, drawings, photographs, and texts, the British artist Tacita Dean has developed a body of work anchored in a singular relationship with time and space. In Dean's work, these two elements are never really separated or isolated from each other but rather closely linked, the indissoluble coordinates of her universe. Dean is constantly seeking to reveal the site of the experience of duration, to create a complicity between space-time and its physical context. For "Here Comes the Sun" the artist presents two films that perfectly demonstrate this approach. In the film "Banewl" (1999), shot on a farm on the coast of Cornwall in England, Dean patiently records the before, during, and after of a solar eclipse. The slowness of the film, whose topic is waiting, reflects the rhythm of the natural physical events being captured by the camera. Due to capricious and overcast weather, the true subject of the film ultimately disappears, inviting the viewer to focus on the landscape of the countryside in its simplest activities. In the same space, the artist screens "Diamond Ring" (2002), also shot during the solar eclipse, just as the sun was beginning to appear behind the moon, creating the effect of a ring of light. It is the fleetingness of the instant but also the 'supernatural' aspect of the event that seems to attract the artist's gaze. Dean decodes almost imperceptible changes and invisible phenomena just as she deciphers the great natural raging and immensity of the sea.

Olafur Eliasson
Born 1967 in Copenhagen, lives and works in Berlin.
Olafur Eliasson investigates the limits of human perception. In a number of works he has created situations to remind us that we are actively perceptive subjects. Our own position in the surroundings and our capacity to give meaning to what we see contributes to the experience of what we see. In a series of work he has returned to the sun and sun light as central metaphors. One of his earliest works, "Beauty" (1993) was an artificial rainbow made by a simple lamp and hose and in "Your Sun Machine" (1997) he created a 'cosmological' installation with the simplest of means (a hole in the roof). "The Weather Project" a recent work (2003/2004) - was a representation of the sun and sky that dominated the expanse of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. For Magasin 3 Eliasson has created a number of new works that together form a "Stockholm Solar Lab".

Avital Geva
Born 1941, lives and works in Ein Shemer.
Avital Geva is a prominent figure in the discourse of conceptual Israeli art. Toward the late 1970s Geva time and again criticized what he found to be the all-too verbal aspect characterizing the statements of the people around him, and the pressing need for more practical, real action. Geva thus ceased his activity in the art world, and in 1977 set up an educational-experimental Greenhouse in his kibbutz, Ein Shemer. Work in the Greenhouse is generally performed in collaboration with changing teams of scientists and with youth, mainly those with difficulties assimilating into the official educational systems. Geva states "through the sense of partaking in the agricultural processes explored, I have opened up to the notion of seasonal time that I connect to a type of spiral, a cycle that also moves forward." In the work "Biofilters and Communities" (2005) Geva reveals his notion of time's cyclic appearance through the growing wheat that is presented in its different ages: from it sprouting up to its withering moments. The botanical world in the work is expanded through the presence of the greenish plankton layer, those microorganisms which grow in water under the plans. The microorganisms, that almost invisible factor in Geva's biosphere functions as its "bio-filter" that purifies the water and thus improves the co-existence between the different participants: the fish, the plants and their encompassing surrounding. The artist describes his work further "My ability to take part in the agricultural and biological processes in the Greenhouse involves a quasi-naive concentration on them as the only way to study them. Thus I find new types of aesthetics, language, in other words - art that is revealed through practice...The research I am currently interested pertains to the plankton layer, a plant nourished by the process of photosynthesis. The nets that are hanged on top of the pond become a potential colony the moment they will be washed by water. That algae inhere the potent appearance of such places in which time has left its mark; places that embrace tiny life forms, (green) evidence of the sun's constant presence and the traces of time that has already passed, and that is passing right now, from here onward... "

Rivane Neuenschwander
Born 1967 in Belo Horizonte, where she currently lives and works.
Besides echoing the rains and the gutters of buildings in Belo Horizonte, Neuenschwander's hometown, the installation "Chove Chuva" (2002) explores systems of containment and circulation. In it, metal buckets hang from the ceiling and rest on the floor of a room. They are filled with water, but small holes in their bottoms allow the water to drop slowly from one bucket to another. For this process of dripping and transfer to continue, someone must participate in the work by pouring the water that falls into the lower buckets back into the hanging ones. The work alludes to the passage of time, to recycling, and, indirectly, to sustainable development, a maintenance of balance that might also be a metaphor for the emotions. Rivane Neuenschwander has repeatedly worked with time and organiziation of it. For "Found Calendar" (2002), the artist used bits of paper from ads, tickets, and newspaper articles numbered, from one to thirty-one - and placed them in order under to construct her own calendars. Neuenschwander has as well created calendars based on expiration dates.

Tobias Rehberger
Born 1966 in Esslingen/Neckar, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main.
Tobias Rehberger has been exploring the processes and context in which aesthetic values emerge. He works in between the areas of design, fashion and architecture and conceives the artist's role as that of a catalyst of people's desires. His installation from 2003, "7 ends of the world" consists of 222 lamps ordered in 7 groups. It belongs to a group of works that use light and digital technology to connect a local situation to one or several other locations around the globe. As planet Earth circles the sun, different groups are activated. Recreating the light in distant cities such as Kyoto and Las Vegas, they shine with increasing strength and then slowly fade away. The entire room thus functions as a complicated solar clock that displays the constellation of the two heavenly bodies. The work is a poly-rhythmic light machine, at once cosmic and very down-to-earth. The viewer who traverses the room walks from time zone to time zone.

Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij
Jeroen de Rijke was born 1970 in Brouwershaven, and Willem de Rooij was born 1969 in Beverwijk. Both artists work and live in Amsterdam.
For the past ten years, this artistic duo has built a close collaboration around the medium of 16mm and 35mm film, while at the same time considering their practice to be similar to painting or sculpture. In their approach, the cinema is reduced to what is most visibly cinematic about it, which is to say, what is most immediately pictorial and sculptural. "Bantar Gebang", (2000), takes Indonesia as its landscape and as its context a vast garbage dump near Jakarta. The film unfolds at dawn, just as the light is suddenly rising. The viewer is invited to contemplate the subtle and rapid changes in luminosity on this unlikely and phlegmatic set.

.....

The text is based on the essays and interviews published in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition "Here Comes the Sun" where the exhibition curators have written on the different artists.

Curators "Here Comes the Sun": Daniel Birnbaum, Rosa Martínez, Jérôme Sans and Sarit Shapira.

PDF >

CONTENTS:
Prologue by David Neuman, Here Comes the Sun Daniel Birnbaum on Olafur Eliasson,Francis Alÿs, Tacita Dean and Tobias Rehberger Working With, Working Between Jérôme Sans in dialogue with Tobias Rehberger, Spectrum of an Image Jérôme Sans on Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, Referring to a Dream Rosa Martínez on Ghada Amer, From One to Another Rosa Martínez on Rivane Neuenschwander, In Front of the Sun Rosa Martínez on Pilar Albarracín, "I always have all the time in the world" Sarit Shapira in dialogue with Avital Geva.
Exhibition catalogue no 33 ISBN 91-974236-7-x. 2 books in a box, illustrated, hard cover. Texts in Swedish/English. Published 2005 by Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall.
Price: 340 SEK (approx. 34 EUR)

Here Comes the Sun by Daniel Birnbaum

Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions, and in being bound to the planet turning on its own axis was no less arbitrary than would be, say, a calculation based on the growth of trees or the duration required for a piece of limestone to disintegrate, quite apart from the fact that the solar day which we take as our guideline does not provide any precise measurement, so that in order to reckon time we have to devise an imaginary, average sun which has an invariable speed of movement and does not incline towards the equator in its orbit. "Austerlitz" / W. G. Sebald, 2001

In "Your Sun Machine" Olafur Eliasson created a "cosmological" installation with the simplest of means. It is a work about the relationship between sun and earth. His contribution is nothing but a hole in the roof of the Californian gallery where the work was presented. Above, the sun blazes, creating a vibrantly hot patch of light on the gallery floor. If you concentrate on the patch, you can actually see the sun moving. Until you remember something you learned in school: the reason that the light of this heavenly body creeps across the floor is that you and your own little planet are tearing across the universe at an unimaginable speed. Or had you forgotten that? We tend to forget certain basic things. "Here Comes the Sun" is an exhibition about cosmology, time, and our most prominent celestial body. Francis Alÿs' work, "Zocalo", is a further example that reminds us of certain fundamental cosmic facts. A flag that stands at the center of the huge square in Mexico City casts a shadow that attracts the people who try to escape the relentless light that falls onto the plaza. Thus, a large solar clock is created with human figures as an element. This is an artwork about the Mexican sun, about the movement of planet Earth through space, and about social life in the Mexican capital. Recent works by Tacita Dean display a related interested in cosmology and time. Circularity and rotation as ciphers of time are recurring features in Dean's projects, most conspicuously present in "Fernsehturm" (2001), a film shot at the revolving restaurant of Berlin's famous television tower. Originally, when the tower was still standing in the GDR, it took one hour for the restaurant to do a full rotation. After 60 minutes (one look at the full 360¡ of the city's horizon), one had to leave the highly sought after seat. Today, after the disappearance of Communism, the rotation is twice as fast. You get a view of all of Berlin in just half an hour. Dean likens the revolving restaurant to the spacecraft in Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey". Once it was a symbol of the future, now it's out of date. It's a perfect anachronism that short-circuits our notions of future and past: "As you sit up there at your table, opposite the person whom you're with, and with your back to the turn of the restaurant, you are no longer static in the present but moving with the rotation of the Earth backwards into the future." Another work connecting rotary motion and time is "Disappearance at Sea" (1996), a film shot at the Berwick lighthouse and displaying nothing but temporality itself and the passage from light to dark when the lighthouse become functional. The "event," says the artist, is the "passage of time" itself: "At night, you watch in the blackness for the rotations of the lighthouse and you decipher time in the gaps between the flashes. Without this cipher, there is no time."

When forms of communication grow old, they become "an index of an understanding of a world lost to us," says artist Stan Douglas in response to the question of the role of outdated technologies in his work. So many artists today seem interested in the very notion of the outmoded. No doubt Dean is deeply attracted to various forms of obsolescence and, as she explains, "courts anachronism - things that were once futuristic but are now out of date." Her choice of medium, film rather than video or digital imagery, clearly relates to this interest: "So obsolescence is about time in the way film is about time: historical time; allegorical time; analog time. I cannot be seduced by the seamlessness of digital time; like digital silence, it has a deadness." She opposes this dead time to the time of old mediums. A time that you can hear; a time that is somehow alive: "I like the time you can hear passing: the prickled silence of magnetic tape or the static on the record." The chief theorist of obsolescence, Walter Benjamin, spelled out most of these motifs already in the 1930s. The emergence of a new technology always gives rise to new artistic and political hopes that tend to fade rather quickly. It's not until the moment a technological device is "eclipsed by its obsolescence" that something happens: its "armoring" breaks down and it "releases the memory of its original promise." This Hoffnung im Vergangenen (Hope in the Past) has been analyzed by Peter Szondi as the temporal figure that characterizes Benjamin's thinking as a whole. It is not just a question of ruins and outmoded technologies but, ultimately, of the very structure of history itself: "The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption." (...)

Excerpt from the catalogue text "Here Comes the Sun" by Daniel Birnbaum, head of the Städelschule, Frankfurt, 2005.

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Pilar Albarracín
"Tartero", 2004
stuffed fighting bull

Francis Alÿs
"Zocalo, May 20 1999", 1999
DVD projection with sound track, 12 hours

Francis Alÿs
"Time Lapse", 2001
16 photographic prints and sun paths, each 31,2 x 64,3 cm

"Bancs", 2005
painted steel, wood
six elements dimensions variable

Ghada Amer
"The Golden Painting 1", 2005

"The Golden Painting 2", 2005
acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas, 162,5 x 183 cm, 183 x 213 cm

Tacita Dean
"Banewl", 1999
16mm color anamorphic film with sound, 63 mins

Tacita Dean
"Diamond Ring", 2002
16mm color film, mute, 27 sec. loop

Olafur Eliasson
"Stockholm Solar Lab", 2005

- "Flowerball", 2005
stainless steel, bulb, wire, color effect filter glass, diameter 84 cm

- "Holo lamp", 2005
lacquered steel
stainless steel, light, holo lens, mirror, 196 x 120 x 70 cm

- "Suncity model", 2005
wood, acrylic glass, 70 x 130 x 50 cm

- "Solar flare lamp", 2005
stainless steel, light bulbs, lenses, wire, diameter 120 cm

- "Suncity drawings", 2005
12 drawings, each 60 x 90 cm

- "Suncooker", 2005
aluminium, steel, glass, bulb, cable, 140 x 80 x 160 cm

- "Colour spectrum series", 2005
48 color photogravures, each 37,3 x 48,3 cm

Avital Geva
"Biofilters and Communities", 2005
site-specific work

Rivane Neuenschwander
"Chove Chuva" [Rains the Rain], 2002
aluminum buckets, steel cable, water and ladder

Rivane Neuenschwander
"Found Calendar I", 2002
paper cutouts on cardboard, 31 parts each 41,6 x 29,6 cm

Tobias Rehberger
"7 ends of the world", 2003
222 glass lamps, bulbs, mountings, computer unit

Jeroen de Rijke / Willem de Rooij
"Bantar Gebang", 2000
35mm color film with optical sound, 10 mins

SEMINAR

In conjunction with the opening, there will be a conversation between two of the curators,
Rosa Martinez and Daniel Birnbaum

Wednesday August 24 at 6 pm
at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Fredsgatan 12, Stockholm.