All the Right Wrong Places

Lights on Romania elegantly demonstrates the meaning of venue for an artwork. 

Closer to You by Teodor Buruiană was not in a living room, which is great.

One of the things I have changed my mind about are touring light art works, showed in several festivals. I used to sneer at them, chuffing about unoriginality and copy-paste curating. Then it dawned to me that not everybody travels several light art festivals per year (or month) (week). It’s most likely the piece I’ve seen thrice the regular audience sees for the very first and only time. Also, it would be economically and ecologically stupid to build a possibly huge and expensive piece just for one show.

Also, venue matters. A lot. An artwork may change to an entirely different experience according to its location. This was elegantly demonstrated in Timișoara. Careful consideration of venues was one of the Lights On Romania festival’s perks. Let's see a few examples.

I do get my kicks from displaced objects. I'm sorry Luke Jerram's Gaia didn't make it to the festival, since it (and his Museum of the Moon) are my favourite examples of a basic thing becoming interesting by being in a totally wrong place. But here, I got a new approach to right / wrong places from Loomaland's swans of Electric Swan Ensemble. 

This is the closest I dared to go

I’ve seen the swans before in Berlin Light Festival, and I do admit it didn’t do much of an impression then. The swans were puddling in a shopping center’s geometrical pool, which is a wrong environment, I admit, but wrong in a wrong way. Also, the surrounding inflatable animals and overall hoodlum rendered the swans as showy toys. In Timișoara, however, the birds were in quite a natural habitat, swimming in the Bega river. And oh my, were they uncanny. Frightening, even. Now I paid more attention to movement of the androidic swans, which was amazingly naturelike. Not counting their ability to change colour, admittedly. The environment changed the artwork from a Tivoli decoration to an equivocal comment on nature, technology, future, and everything. At least for me.

The artwork was beautiful even with people in it

Another art piece elevated by environment was Squidshop’s Submergence. Last time I saw it in Jyväskylä WinterLight, in an indoors exhibition with several other artworks. It was nice then, yes, but seeing it in an derelict, roofless movie theatre was a totally different experience. The surrounding decay created a striking contrast to the tidy and premeditated twinkles of light. That kind of barren beauty just is not possible in a neutral environment. This was a playground no more, but an eerily beautiful, breathtakingly melancholic art installation.

Some light exercise

In Pavol Truben's Under Pressure, life sized characters with glowy heads nearly bursting of stress are desperately trying to relax via yoga-like poses. It would have been quite obvious to place the piece in a gym or an office. But no, the ever lasting stretches were done in a walled garden. The ambiguous environment reflects the artwork both in a concrete way with its white walls but also its ambience. The lush, prestigious backyard is supposed to be relaxed, but it is all too well gardened to be really bohemian. The already humorous, if heartbreaking, artwork gains yet another jest from its milieu.

In addition to very well placed art objects, there were other great things about the Lights on festival, like a beautiful city, a humane amount of artworks, expanded program and super nice people. Especially Andi and Daniel, who took their time to show me around and gracefully tolerated my never ending blabber about light art. And made sure I had enough crisps at all times.