When Victoria Coeln projects specially wrought light-images for the creation of her Chromographies on the places, spaces, or sites chosen and visited by her, which are scarcely or not at all illuminated by sunlight or artificial light, she achieves, as she herself says, not really their illumination but rather their “exposure”. That is: Victoria Coeln’s specific art of illumination of her subjects is proceeded by the exposure of photographic film material — the intended chromographic image already exists for the duration of the projection in the real three-dimensional space.
Its photographic copy then serves primarily its transformation into a two-dimensional image format, presentable and reproducible elsewhere. Yet “to expose” also means above all: to make visible, to make manifest. And precisely in this sense Victoria Coeln’s first exposure effectuates a spatial deepening of the actual in situ conditions, as well as their alienation, in particular with regard to aspects of colour and form. And this alienation is able — also in view of its photographic depiction – to bring about a polymorphic guessing game: what does this image depict, where was it made, what is hidden behind its visible surface? Is it more or something other than a photographic, possibly painterly, or otherwise produced aesthetic art image? And here at the same time the second phase of the “exposure” begins: a conceptual, investigative-reconstructive or also fantasizing archaeology on the part of the beholder. This search for connections of a topographic, historical, political and/or aesthetic nature guides us along beneath the surfaces, swathed in coloured light, of the cultural and natural monuments which Victoria Coeln has selected. Contemporary, yet also chronologically far removed layers are brought out into the light, the layers of the past are spiritually exposed. “When I am in the space for a certain amount of time,” says the artist, “I begin to lay down spiritual traces in the space. When somebody enters the room, in my imagination lines are created on the floor, a two-dimensional grid pattern. When this person scans the room with their gaze, an additional three-dimensional web is formed in the space. I see this as white lines, which span the room for me. If I then imagine further that this person in the meantime thinks in the past and into the future, then through these timelines an immense, dense, at least four-dimensional matrix is formed, which fills the room, expands it, and is diffused through it.”
The spaces in which and over which Victoria Coeln places her light traces are already in and of themselves multi-culturally and multi-chronologically charged. Göbekli Tepe, for example, one of the oldest and at the same time largest cult sites in the world, is viewed as the site of origin of the cultivation of grain, and thereby marks the transition from nomadic peoples to settled communities. The so-called Serapeion in Ephesos was first interpreted by archaeologists as a temple dedicated to Emperor Claudius, then as a Nymphaeum, later as a temple dedicated to the syncretistic Egypto-Hellenistic deity Serapis, and finally as a temple for the Muses. In the early Christian era this much-interpreted building was converted into a church. And the Cemetery of the Seven Sleepers at Ephesos, where, since their persecution by Emperor Decius, seven Christians are believed to have slept for 200 years, namely, until Christianity became the Roman state religion, is today a site of pilgrimage for Christians as well as for Muslims. Paşa Bağ, also called Valley of the Monks, lies in that region of Cappadocia through which the ancient Silk Road passed. Since the Bronze Age, people here expanded the original caves of volcanic tufa in the landscape, and developed them over the course of time into extensive residential and cloister complexes, even complete cities. In the rock ‘bowling pins’ that have been formed due to erosion, the ‘fairy chimneys’ of Paşa Bağ, after the 5th century the followers of Symeon Stylites the Elder, who is viewed as the first stylite, set up their hermitages. Instead of living and preaching on top of a column as Symeon did, these ‘stylites’ appeared out of their caves in the rock towers, scarcely accessible at a height of ca. 10 metres. Finally, the Tuz Gölü lake, with a proportion of 33% salt, is one of the most saline lakes in the world. 70% of the salt consumed in Turkey is obtained here. In the summer months a crystalline layer of salt is formed on its surface which, depending on the angle of the incidental sunlight, glimmers in numerous delicate colours. The chromotopic light of Victoria Coeln, in contrast, makes the white gold of Tuz Gölü manifest at night, and transforms the salt hills of its saline material into multi-coloured, luminous mountain scapes.
Chromotopia, as the artist calls the multi-dimensional results of her chromotopic interventions, could also be the name of a worldscape which Victoria Coeln bathes in her light from region to region, in order to make visible all of the realities contained in them, superimposed in them, crossing in them. For her exhibition at the Yunus Emre Enstitüsü, the Turkish Cultural Centre in Vienna, she envisions precisely that significant part of Chromotopia at which the pathways of eastern and western cultures since time immemorial encounter each other.
Transalation: Sarah Cormack