Visual artist based in Berlin, Ivana Franke joined EPIDEMIC in 2018.
Her works, often in the form of light installations, investigate the interface between consciousness and environment, focusing on perceptual thresholds.
The linear spatial installation, made of translucent material resembling a spider web, occasionally catches the diffuse light from the windows, sometimes remaining invisible. It superimposes a complex geometric drawing (derived from a projection graph visualizing a six-dimensional cube) over the building’s geometry.
6-dimensional cube-graph structure is multiplied three times.
These multiplications are superimposed.
The elaborate system for constructing the net following this superimposition has been developed.
While the artwork delineates space in a way, it points to the fact that the space as such cannot be divided. We cannot divide space, space interpenetrates everywhere. Space is not something which we can own, we cannot grasp it, we cannot see it.
This is the environment we are in and unquestionably share; we shift our consciousness to the quality of the air we breathe and do not focus on the rules and controls of imaginary boundaries and limits. … a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries.
Presentations:
• 13 April - 20 May 2012: 2012: Franke / Galeta, Église Saint-Nicolas, Caen (FR)
• 19 April - 09 July 2023: DIMENSIONS – Digital Art since 1859, Pittlerwerke, Leipzig (DE),
organised by Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, e.V. Bonn, Chief curator: Richard Castelli, co-curators: Dan Xu, Clara Blume
Travel Along Unknown takes visitors into the journey through seemingly unreal space inhabited with animate, unknown creatures. In the pitch dark room, for a while there is nothing to see, the familiar world outside of us has been visually erased. As one's eyes adjust to darkness, faint shapes slowly appear - undulating lines of light precariously floating in the air. Walking throughout the room makes these uncanny light waves oscillate; their amplitudes change in correlation to the movement of one's mind and body, as if the light transcribes them into imagery capable to respond to our thoughts. They dissolve into darkness and appear at different places again.
This visual and bodily experience stretches our perceptual and cognitive thresholds, it suspends our mental habits of quickly extracting relevant information from our surrounding by using familiar categories, and we are moved to reflect on the existence of other - unknown, fictive, imaginary dimensions of our consciousness and the world.
First presentation: 24 October - 02 November and 01 - 16 December 2020 (curator: Tobias Staab), Oval Office, Schauspielhaus, Bochum (DE)
A swarm of tiny lights resembling fireflies floats in the otherwise completely dark room. In a hypnotic manner, this multitude of lights slowly but continuously moves forward until disappearing in the dark central area, and then retreats backwards towards the walls of the room.
Two large-scale cylindrical objects hang from the ceiling, one next to another, with the slight overlap. They are made of vertically suspended white tulle (transparent fabric) sheets. One cylinder is slowly rotating clockwise and the other one counterclockwise. A slide projector is installed far behind the cylinders. It projects a hexagonal grid of numerous thin light rays onto the fabric. Due to the transparency of the fabric, light is rendered on each sheet of tulle, creating a three-dimensional grid of moving light dots.
A large three-dimensional pyramidal cube with internal plane divisions, made out of white tulle (transparent fabric) is suspended from the ceiling. Three slide projectors are installed in three different corners of the space, orthogonally to the sides of the cube. They project light rays onto the cube. Due to the fabric’s transparency, light is rendered in forms of intersectional dots on all the planes, creating a dense three-dimensional maze of light dots.