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ELEKTRA X PARADISE ART SPACE
EXHIBITION
INSCAPE – Voyage to Hidden Landscape, Herman Kolgen
September 17, 2021 - February 6, 2022
Paradise Art Space, Incheon, South Korea
ELEKTRA and Paradise Art Space launch an exclusive media art exhibition by Quebec artist Herman Kolgen, INSCAPE – Voyage to Hidden Landscape.
This large-scale event will be the first comprehensive solo show by Quebec artist Herman Kolgen that presents his entire oeuvre. The exhibition is curated by Jay Bang, Senior curator of Paradise Art Space and co-produced by Alain Thibault, Artistic Director of ELEKTRA.
As one of the pioneering artists in the Media Art scene, Herman Kolgen displays his profound reflexion on the dynamics of the human-nature relationship in the post-pandemic era through the lens of Media Art. His work offers the audience an opportunity to explore the theme of ‘Little Things Big Routes’.
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The exhibition consisting of eight artworks, ranging from his new commissioned works to mega-scale versions of his representative pieces, encourages the audience to be aware of the hidden aspects that will shape the post-pandemic reality: Humanity and the artificial, Humanity and nature, and Humanity in a new societal landscape.
HERMAN KOLGEN [QC-CA]
Herman Kolgen is an acclaimed multidisciplinary artist with more than three decades of experience in media arts. As an audio-cinematic sculptor, his artistic inspiration lies in the intimate relationship between sound and image, leading to installations, video & film works, performances, and sound sculptures. He works in a constant exploration cycle at the crossroads of different media to conjure up a new technical language and a singular aesthetic. The interrelation between human life and its surrounding environment takes the central stage of his conceptual pursuits. The resulting brutal tensions and the interplay between various elements constitute the epicenter of his practice.
ARTWORKS
ISOTOPP
Installation
LCD Panels, LED Array, Data Optic Sensor, Projector, Audio 2 channels, Etc
10m x 3.5m x 2m 10m x 3.5m x 2m
Two years of collaboration with the researchers Jean-Charles Tomas, Tomas Roger, and Herman Kolgen have conceived a system linked to an Interpretation of the GANIL research activities for visual and sound performance and installation. On stage, the system is linked in real-time with the nuclear center. Le GANIL proceeds to study this phenomenon by colliding nuclear at very high speed. The basis is to crash beam at 100,000km/sec of heavy ions(elements whose weight is located between the atom of carbon and the atom of uranium) into the nucleus targets. Sensors record the effects of this bombardment, then studied in detail by the researchers. Herman Kolgen conceptualizes a vision that aims to express the research lead by Le GANIL, Transposing this knowledge based on actual data to create a visual and sound dynamic substance.
BAKTERIUM
Installation
LED Panels, LED Array, Cube Frame, Audio 2 channels, Etc
3m x 3m x 3m
In collaboration with New York-based bio artist Tal Danino and Korean curator Jay Bang, Herman Kolgen explores an interweave of technological insight and social implication in the global pandemic with his artistic inspiration. The artist recontextualizes the swarming nature of Proteus Mirabilis bacteria that drives infection and transmission with the swarming intelligence algorithm and outbreak pattern of the Covid 19 pandemic.
AFTERSHOCK
Installation
LCD Panels, Video, Quadrarangular Frame, Etc
2mx2mx1m
The dimension of nuclear waste is truly mind-bogging. Human-created nuclear waste is incredibly harmful to hundreds of thousands of years. We have to imagine that the impact of our activities stretches far into a nonhuman future. Focuses on nuclear aesthetics from the atomic sublime to radioactive divinity, Aftershock offers a poetic take on the consequences of several brutal topological shocks.
RETINA_NEW
Projection+Laser
LaserTracker, Video Projector, Audio 2 channels, Etc
2.5m x 1.5m
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Using the human camera of our iris, traces of light are transmitted to our brain, where they are potentially encoded in our memory. We depend on light to interpret fragments of our world at every moment - how many images have our visual perception registered, processed, and compiled throughout our lives? What remains of these diffracted moments and ephemeral flashes that result from the constant bombing go photons and create a retinal amnesia filter of sight. Herman Kolgen explores the coexistence of the human and its intermediate territories - a double relationship that interrogates real, intimate, and exterior - in all of its fragility, permeability, and indeterminacy.
URBAN WIND
Installation
Accordions, Medical Tube, Wind Sensor, Electric Transmitter, Projector, Data Cloud Platform, Etc
18m x 18m
Urban Wind is an installation from Herman Kolgen’s <Wind fields> series. The devices of the series wind fields have in common that they rely, in one way or another, on the dynamic characteristics of the wind, the air flux. In Urban Wind, wind sensors are installed in strategic points of the city like intersections, bridges, tunnels, parks, rooftops. The velocity and direction of the wind will be analyzed and then transmit by wifi to a group of accordions that will emit a euphonic soundscape. The public can hear the pulmonary dynamics of the city through the bellows of each accordion. The harmony of the accordion is created by the wind flow differently every single time.
OKULAR
AudioVisual
Tryptich LED Panels, Media Server, Etc.
25m x 3.5m
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OKULAR, is an extension of RETINA. Initially designed to be projected in the enclosure of a swimming pool, Okular, located at the aquatic boundaries of the eye, no longer proposes to explore the interior and exterior fields of our visual storage, but what remains of our corneal imprints, our crystalline traces and our tissue phantoms inscribed on our membrane. Using microscopic explorations, Okular dives into the very heart of this living barrier where matter comes to light; where solid and liquid textures pass through the transparency prism. Like a micro film, Okular reveals the indelible distortions of optics that extrapolated reality sends back to us.
LifeFORM
AudioVisual
1 CH HD DISPLAY 3:1, 2 TO 4 CH SOUND, 10 MINUTES
24m x 8m
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<LifeFORM> illustrates the question of where human beings caught between the infinitely large and the infinitely small remain connected to everything. Based on this observation and the chain reactions taking its leitmotif from the viral transcription of COVID-19, the artwork explores the “humble position” we occupy between the visible and the invisible, defined by our interdependence on all forms of life. Thus, subject to both biological and genetic random mutations, to temporal and geographical conditions, our species has no choice to metamorphose and innovate.
SEISMIK_Mesh territory
Media Façade
16 Projectors, Ambient Sound System, Etc
80m x 20m
A dramatic descent underground beneath the rubble, seismik invites us to take a multi-sensory leap into the unknown, where sedimentary friction, magnetic waves, rumbling water, abstraction, and motifs clash and collide against a backdrop of visual and sonic dislocations. Stretch out and adapted an extensive media façade on an overwhelming scale offers a magnificent spectacle.
With the support of the Québec Government Office in Seoul
