Seeing with Eyes Closed
2011. Wooden construction, polystyrene panels, white LED-lights, control unit, pillow. 122 x 60 x 110 cm. Duration of the sequence: 3 mins 18 secs
Visitors are invited to sit on the floor in front of a semi-circular object that holds a screen of numerous LED lights, and close their eyes. They are exposed to flashing light of different frequencies, which gives rise to a visual experience of flowing images within ones mind; spiders, a flight above the Earth, a city scene, vibrating waves, swirling spirals... Being aware that the seen images have no foundation in external reality, one is not sure where they are coming from and experiences them as hallucinatory. This ‘conscious quasi-hallucinating’ challenges our sense of the real in its alternation and its permeability with the imaginary. More so because each person’s experience is different, it is singular and unverifiable.
"(...) In Seeing with Eyes Closed the artist accompanies the observers on a journey inside the mind, on a “quasi-hallucinatory” experiment of visualization and urges them to become a living medium, in order to discover themselves as the carriers of unknown and mysterious images. Always interested, in her sophisticated artistic research, in questioning the subtle liminal horizon between the visible and the invisible, between the real and the unrepresentable, with Seeing with Eyes Closed, Ivana questions and attempts to loosen the borders between sense perception and imagination, between visual reality and the realm of mental images. Like a speleologist, with the use of light she penetrates into the mysterious caves of the human cerebral cortex, into the folds of memory and of the visual."
From the text by Elena Agudio
Project development, realization: Sandra Aracic, Frank Spenling, Shira Wachsmann, Benni Kammerer. Photos Ivana Franke Studio
Seeing with Eyes Closed, Ed. Elena Agudio, Ivana Franke. Association of Neuroaesthetics, Berlin, 2011
Events
Strobe and hallucination event, Institut fur Raumexperimente, UdK, Berlin, 2010
With: Julius von Bismark (Strobe light experiment), Laura McLardy, (Dream Machine experiment), Jimena Canales, (History of strobe light), Matthias Sohr (History of hallucinations), Ida Momennejad, Ivana Franke. / Experiment with Intermittent Photic Stimulator (IPS) – a strobe lamp used for diagnosing photosensitive epilepsy, in cooperation with Alexander Abbushi, neurosurgery dept. Charite hospital.
Seeing with Eyes Closed, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 2011
With: Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Olafur Eliasson, Jeebesh Bagchi (Raqs Media Collective), Semir Zeki, Vittorio Gallese, Moran Cerf, Ida Momennejad, Ivana Franke Curated by Elena Agudio, co-curated by Anton Burdakov, (AoN, Berlin). Initiated with Alexander Abbushi.
Seeing with Eyes Closed – The immeasurable realm of subjective reality, Deutsche Gugennheim, Berlin, 2012. With: Fernando Vidal, Carsten Nicolai, Ida Momennejad,, Ivana Franke. Moderated by Daniel Margulies
Waking Background, Lauba, Zagreb, 2012
With: Ulrich W. Thomale, Suncica Ostojic, Ida Momennejad, Ivana Franke
Photographs courtesy of Institut fur Raumexperimente, AoN, Deutsche Gugennheim, Lauba.
