Ivana Franke

Ivana Franke

Croatia/Germany

 

Ivana Franke is a visual artist based in Berlin. Her investigations with light approach the interface between consciousness and environment, focusing on perceptual thresholds. Recent solo exhibitions include Retreat into Darkness. Towards a Phenomenology of the Unknown in Schering Stiftung Project Space in Berlin (2017) and Perceptual Drift (Galaxies in Mind) in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (2017). Her other projects include Disorientation Station (11th Shanghai Biennale, 2016) and Seeing with Eyes Closed (Peggy Guggenheim, Venice, 2011; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, 2012). She represented Croatia at the 52nd Venice Biennale with the solo exhibition Latency (2007), at the 9th Venice Biennale of Architecture with collaborative work Frameworks (2004). Other exhibitions include Manifesta 7 (2008), and MoMA P.S.1. (2001).

 

Knowledge of Fireflies

Installation in a dark space. Spherical metal construction, monofilament, one motor, three light bulbs, two control units

120 x 120 x 120 cm

2022


One is entering into pitch dark space. For several minutes there is nothing to see. Visual world has vanished, but one is intensely present. After a while, faint sparks slowly appear, at indefinable position in space resembling a micro-universe, a changing constellation of stars, while moving towards them they move with you, in unexpected directions. Perceived light translates into experience of seemingly unreal space with animate floating shapes that challenge our perception and imagination, suggesting spatial architectures that cannot be identified through the ones we already know. It allows speculating on the existence of other dimensions, unknown places that we can inhabit, and other then habitual modes of knowing accessible to our minds. Remembrance of something long forgotten that has perhaps not yet arrived.

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