Monstrous Moonshine
Ivana Franke
April 28 – May 26
Tue – Sat 10 am – 6 pm
Opening
April 27, 7 pm
Jarmuschek + Partner in collaboration with Galleri Niklas Belenius are proud to present the exhibition Monstrous Moonshine by Ivana Franke.
Without darkness, no light
There’s something black with Ivana Franke, something profoundly dark and unpleasant. This blackness is not Ivana in person, but it lives within her and forces itself to come out in her works. I might be wrong, but I don’t think so. Her light-installations are amazing but not only in a physical way – they move me mentally, or on many mental levels. When I visit her works uncertainty strikes me. I’m in the middle of an architecture that makes me leave the phenomena called “light” and return to the feeling of the fear of darkness of my childhood. Not knowing where to put my feet; not daring to open the closet door; not being able to handle a darkness without one single sprinkle of light. The horror that this blackness represents within a child in a closed room is the insecurity of the unknown vibrating, and it make the heart pound faster and
faster. To insert the arm in a dark hole in a murky cellar. The superiority of the unknown.
Without light there’s no painting. Without darkness there’s no light. I suppose that the art that Ivana Franke presents doesn’t come from a genuine interest in the characteristics of light, but from a series of experiences of darkness – the dark. Only an artist that has the experience of the dark and has, in some way, managed to accept an existential black abyss knows what light means. It is this uncertainty that I sense in Franke’s works – an intensive combination of fear and bliss.
(Text by Carl Michael von Hausswolff, 2009)
In this exhibition Franke presents In circles (2009). A large metal ring is suspended from the roof and interwoven with monofilament (fishing line). One LED light hangs above it. Visible moving circles are made of reflections of light from the (fishing) lines. Here Franke develops her concept of a complex, unstable and continuously changeable space. The viewer becomes an active part of the work where the movements of the observer, or the changing angles of vision, creates multiple forms of experiences of the light structure and therefore altering the images of the encounter with the work.
Her previous exhibitions include Peggy Guggenheim, Venice, 2011, P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York; the Venice Architecture Biennale; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; the Venice Biennale; Reykjavik Experiment Marathon; Manifesta 7
Ivana Franke was born in 1973 in Zagreb and she currently lives and works in Berlin.
Address
Jarmuschek + Partner
Invalidenstrasse 50/51
Halle am Wasser
10557 Berlin
