LOOKING AT THE SUN AT MIDNIGHT: KATHARINA SIEVERDING

Katharina Sieverding presents in the Corner Space of Galerie Thomas Schulte her video installation Looking at the Sun at Midnight SDO/NASA (Blue), 2010-2015. Through the animation of thousands of images, which were taken by a satellite of the NASA in the complementary colour spectrum of the sun, the glowing blue sun appears as a rotating star, which shines far from the gallery space into the urban environment.

Katharina Sieverding’s projection Looking at the Sun at Midnight SDO/NASA (Blue), 2010-2015 from December 10 illuminates the Corner Space at Galerie Thomas Schulte. The artist has animated 200.000 4K satellite data from outer space into a dynamic almost four hour video loop showing the „complementary sun“. Sieverding used image material provided by NASA to create an overwhelming image of a rotating, glowing blue star. After dark the sun shines from inside the gallery space into the urban environment, thus becoming visible to passers-by as a cosmic extension of the white cube. The Solar Dynamcis Observatory (SDO) mission, which was launched in February 2010, has made it possible – through satellite images in the complementary colour spectrum – to observe the star, which otherwise can never be looked at with the naked eye. For Sieverding’s work, both the critical analysis of scientific and rationalistic thinking and its imaging techniques, interpretations, and consequences for example in bio politics play an important role as well as the idea of extending the physical space-time dimension into the „political“ space.

The title of the four hour video „Looking at the Sun at Midnight“ has been accompanying Sieverding already since her studies in the 1960s and has been eponymous for many of her most important series of works. Imagining the sun through the earth is an exercise and cognitive effort for everyone with the result of finding climate change, the finite nature of our resources, the destruction of the protecting layers between earth and sun, and growing global ignorance and greed as well that lead to rape and eviction. Looking at the Sun at Midnight SDO/NASA (Blue), 2010-2015, was first shown at the Museum Schloss Moyland in 2013, subsequently at the Kunsthalle Giessen in 2014, and in 2016 at the GLFK Halle Süd, Tölz and at the Akademie-Galerie of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In spring 2017 it will be exhibited as part of Sieverding’s imminent retrospective at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn. In the video installation, the artist combines references to clairvoyant abilities, cosmic dimensions, and contemporary technologies – a recurring concept in the artist’s oeuvre.