Joanna Rajkowska
Uses objects, films, photography, installations, ephemeral actions, and interferences of various kinds in her work. She produces architectural projects, geological fantasies, excavation sites, underwater sculptures and ephemeral actions. Not all are realized, but they often work as collective utopia. Most of her works happen, live and age in the public space. Thus, their matter consists of all entities involved as well as their relations, including organic and inorganic beings. She critically engages with the legacy, politics and aesthetics of land art and employs the strategy of unfamiliarity as a political tool. De-familiarizing, de-humanizing and relating are her operating devices. She is interested in limitations of human activities, multiplicity of agencies and human and non-human relations.
Installation: Event Horizon
Event Horizon is a sign devised to de-familiarize our notion of time and space. Pointing upwards, it invites us to look up at the sky. The message consists of one sentence written in white neon light, which says: the nearest event horizon is about 6000 light years from us. An event horizon is a point of no return from which even light cannot escape. The shape of the neon letters emphasize and slightly distort Euclidean perspective as they get smaller, tilted and further apart towards the end of the sentence. Apparently, from an observer’s point of view, an object approaching the horizon appears to slow down indefinitely and never passes it. This is an optical effect caused by the paths of the light rays. The particular event horizon in the project is located in the Cygnus X-1 binary star system in the constellation Cygnus and belongs to its black hole. The radius of this event horizon is thought to be about 44 km.
July 21st – Friday
18:00 Installation: Event Horizon
Brehmer Sanatorium
