“There was less light in the universe last week than today, and there will be more light in the universe next week than today.” – Kévin Bray
The Transformation of Matter Creates Light is Kévin Bray’s most comprehensive immersive installation to date. Set to open at Trauma Bar und Kino on 17 September 2022, the exhibition will showcase the interdisciplinary artist’s latest work—an automated choreography of moving screens that produce large light sculptures in Trauma Bar und Kino’s main space.
Exhibited here for the first time, Bray’s installation invites you to experience the visual mapping and exploration of technically enhanced human transformations. In this work, the artist and video maker employs a technique he developed as part of a research residency earlier this year in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, which uses different layers to assemble his light sculptures.
A system of cross-sectional videos constructs light bodies visible through the gaze of a long-exposure photograph. It gives you an overview of the different devices and equipment used in individual and common human transformations—such as implants, piercings, pharmaceutical drugs, telephones, and computers.
Bray thus reveals the complexity of our continuously augmented bodies and the potential dangers of such modifications. Blurring the boundaries between research and fiction, science and myth, the monumental light apparitions in this exhibition merge the organic nature of the human body with biological engineering.
Within this installation, Bray discloses a breakdown of transformations that have modified our bodies and skills for millennia in order to align with our evolving thoughts and identities. From natural healing elements used for medicinal purposes to genome editing (a molecular biology technique used to induce targeted mutations in very specific sections of DNA), from plastic surgery to pacemakers, from in vitro to burial—through these different layers, Bray shows us that human identity is a perpetually evolving material.
The exhibition is curated by Madalina Stanescu.
