Ulrike Hanstein
This week, Ulrike from Valie Export Center in Linz talked about the artwork “(…)
Bass (2024), an immersive installation and intense composition of light and sound, which was jointly commissioned by Dia Art Foundation New York and Schaulager Basel. Bass might be best described as a durational audiovisual performance: In the huge empty exhibition space a pulsing soundscape of five different bass instruments interweaves with the highly saturated colored light from LED tubes, which moves through the entire visible spectrum from violet to red. Disorienting the beholders’ embodied sense of place and time, the throbbing shifts of hue, luminance, volume, vibration, frequency, pace, timbre, and tone seemingly improvise the beholders’ own acts of perception. How could a history of violence appear in abstract but singular shapes, and reverberate by means of musical forms unfolding in the present? What does it mean for beholders to attune to color, tone, and scale in the vacillating experience of sensing the chromatic? How can light and sound be described as spectral – as haunting and physical – conditions, which link embodied sensory perceptions with social constructions of race?”
