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MOMENTUM Artists-in-Residence OPEN STUDIO
featuring Keegan Luttrell and Sara Alavi
22nd of July
19:30
 |
Hochstraße, 45 13357 Berlin
(Adjacent to the Humboldthain S-bahn)
How do we experience time in an isolated state? How do shadows produce vivid feelings? Sara through her installation will provoke our thinking and will make us doubt things we considered as given. She will attempt to make us ponder about what we expect and how we react when an outcome has turned out differently. Furthermore, she closely examines a so common object, the chair, and the numerous thoughts and situations with which it is connected, throughout the world.
Keegan simulates circumstances of isolation and how they could affect a human mind, body or environment. Her multi-media installations make us rethink the lapse of time and the deviation from normal. How does our perception change when we are outside the social environment? How do we interact with the new elements around us? Could we feel isolated even within our safety net?
“Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state … Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.”
– The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
During her residency, Keegan Luttrell investigated the affects of institutionalization and the nature of time in an isolated state. Drawing inspiration from where she currently lives, a small mountain town in Switzerland that famously housed patients in Sanatoriums throughout the early 1900s, her research revolved around one’s relationship to time when removed from the outside world. Through creating various simulated lenses to these imagined worlds, a shift of what is real and what is perceived is depicted through portals and slivers of built and simulated environments. Through video, sculpture and performance, Luttrell has used her art practice and studio space to channel the behaviors of the isolated and the means and ways one builds a relationship to the awareness of time.
Sara Alavi makes us rethink our belief that shadows exist just because we can see them. Existence concerns what can be defined, yet the only thing definable in the case of a shadow is what creates it: light and a barrier.
Shadow is where the light does not exist. To talk about a shadow, we point out to the barrier that obstructs the light. It is our anticipation of the barrier obstructing the light that helps us recognize this undefinable thing. It seems paradoxical that something undefinable can produce tangible feelings. Shadow persists in existing through our definitions.
As a matter of experience, for every material object, there corresponds the possibility of its shadow; but when we turn off the light, Shadow ceases to exist. So relying on our senses, its existence is ephemeral. It is an elusive being between a déjà vu or a prediction.
Shadow resembles the possibilities like hope and despair. For every material object, there corresponds the possibility of hope and despair. Hope indicates a barrier that gives rise to it. In a city destroyed in war, or in a living creature in a mortal condition, hope and despair coexist. Despair is the endless doubt that the shadow is merely an illusion.
CV – Website
Keegan Luttrell is a multi-media artist living and working in Leysin, Switzerland. She completed her MFA in sculpture at Mills College in Oakland, California in 2013. She graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008 with a BFA in Art History, Theory and Criticism and a concentration in Photography. She has shown works in San Francisco, Oakland, Brooklyn, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Aix-en-Provence, France, Geneva Switzerland and Athens and Santorini, Greece. She is a recipient of the Murphy and Cadogan fellowship award and the Betsy Worden Memorial Fund Scholarship. In Leysin, she teaches visual art at an international boarding school.
CV
Sara Alavi (b.1979, Tehran) is an Iranian artist based in Milan. She studied painting at the Art Department of Alzahra University in Tehran, concluding her studies in 2002. She moved to Rome in 2006 to continue her studies in multimedia projects at La Sapienza University, which she completed in 2010. Since 2011 she lives and works in Milan where she received her second level Degree in Painting at Accademia Di Belle Arti di Brera.She is the current recipient of the Terna Prize which awarded her a residency here in Berlin.
PHOTOS OF THE EVENT
(photos by Marina Belikova)
