Daylight piece

The exhibition was based around the theme of free will and had an international group of artists addressing this topic using a variety of media. The site was an old bunker in the former East Berlin underneath an old warehouse that had previously been used to produce tanks during the Second World War.

“Daylight Piece” is a response to the space using 14 daylight-balanced fluorescent tubes strategically placed in an abandoned stairwell to give the appearance that the stairs are leading outdoors to a bright sunny day.

This piece is looking at site-specificity with references to the architectural sculptures of Gordon Matta-Clark and 60s Minimalism, particularly the work of Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, and Dan Flavin. The curatorial proposal was to create a work within the bunker that addressed the idea of "free will": but after much deliberation, I came to the realisation that any physical work would be consumed by the history of the exhibition’s location. All I could do was to present the space itself as the work. The piece further elaborates on the physicality of an object, particularly in relation to the artist/object/space/viewer relationship as presented by Brian O’Doherty in his book, “Inside the White Cube”.

Similar to my previous pieces, the research explores my interest in the status of the artwork, its reception and transience. The underlying research in “Daylight Piece” is: when an artwork is not physically present, how does the object/space/viewer relationship exist, and to what degree, particularly with the historical weight of a bunker in Berlin? The exhibition was supported by Arena Berlin and was officially opened by Mikhail Gorbachev who visited the space on his visit to Berlin. A full-colour catalogue accompanied the exhibition.

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