Site-specific light art for Laakirchen and special exhibition at the Austrian Papermaking Museum Municipality of Laakirchen / Steyrermühl.
As part of the European Capital of Culture Bad Ischl Salzkammergut 2024 program, the KunsGabrik 4.0 association has invited the internationally renowned Viennese media artist Victoria Coeln to the Austrian Papermaking Museum in Laakirchen. She will develop a walk-in artistic intervenJon for both the outdoor space on the Traun river and a room in the museum.
“Lines of light and fragments of color will overwrite the Traun, its surroundings and an interior of the old paper mill in such a way that they can be completely rediscovered: transformed into works of light art or, more precisely, into chromotopes that combine to form Chromotopia,” says Victoria Coeln, who coined this term for her site-specific light spaces. She has been creating chromotopes at outstanding locations all over the world since 1994. Recently, for example, she turned the Austrian Parliament into a highly visible work of light art. “My chromotopes are created wherever questions of coexistence are at stake and where a sediment of emotions and memories needs to be discovered and transformed,” says the artist. “I create spaces of insight that renegotiate and reformat existing narratives – spaces of light open to all that can inspire new encounters and exchanges.”
In the site-specific outdoor work, the artist devotes herself to the Laakirchen Traun, which was and is of great importance for the history and present of the city as a location for paper production. Victoria Coeln: “The triad of water, paper and light changed the world. To this day, it connects people of different origins, countries and cultures. Especially against the backdrop of the European idea, the papermaking museum in the old paper mill in Laakirchen is a place that deserves attention.”
Friederike Reiter: “Kunsfabrik4.0 creates the conditions needed to create art on site and for the site. The focus is also on the changing history, social effects of a changing world of work and perhaps the visionary future view of art, which makes transformation processes visible and tangible. In Chromotopia, Victoria Coeln uses light to draw never-before-seen shapes in landscapes and spaces. She invites us to enter spaces of perception in which light, like music or silence, speaks to us in a universal language.”
The light intervention in the outdoor space will be on display on selected evenings. As a photographic exhibit, it will be part of the exhibition in the papermaking museum. The special exhibition provides an insight into the artist’s exploration of light as a medium and material through various groups of works; the walk-in chromotope in the large gallery space of the papermaking museum in the old paper mill invites visitors to become part of the light art themselves and thus a “participating subject” of the exhibition.
In addition to an accompanying program of talks and workshops by the Kunsfabrik 4.0 association, Victoria Coeln will be creating a pop-up chromotope in the Laakirchen church on 7 September. For one evening, the sacred interior will be transformed into a work of light art that enters into a dialog with the music of the organ.
Chromotopia is curated by Friederike Reiter and Heike Sütter.
CHROMOTOPIA - Opening
August 4, 2024
6pm Opening of the exhibition
Alfred Hannes Heinzel | Eigentümer Papiermachermuseum
Fritz Feichtinger | Bürgermeister Laakirchen
Elisabeth Schweeger | Künstlerische Geschäftsführerin Kulturhauptstadt Europas Bad Ischl Salzkammergut 2024
7pm Tour through the exhibition by Heike Sütter (curator) and Victoria Coeln (artist)
8:30pm Opening of CHROMOTOP LAAKIRCHNER TRAUN
Chromatic Polylog
Analog Sound- and Light performance and Intervention at the Traun
Victoria Coeln | visual arts
Matthias Leboucher | electronics
Helēna Sorokina | voice
Program for the exhibition
Day of industrial culture
September 5, 2024
16.00/18:00/22.00 hrs
Guided tours through the special exhibition CHROMOTOPIA and the permanent exhibition of the Austrian Papermaking and Printing Museum
17.00 and 19.00
CONCERT TRIO MELISANDE
Contemporary music in the context of industrial culture in the chromotopic light room of the special exhibition
Charles Brink, flute, Martina Reiter, viola, Andrea Hampl, harp,
20.00 to 22.00
CHROMOTOP LAAKIRCHNER TRAUN
Site-specific light art, on the Traun / museum island
Light, art and church
September 07, 2024, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Chromotop Laakirchen parish church
A multimedia work for everyone: the church becomes a temporary work of light art that enters into a dialog with the organ music.
19.00 to 22.00
The church becomes a temporary work of light art that enters into a dialog with the music of the organ – a multi-media work for everyone:
Victoria Coeln, light art
Maria Plschkova, organ
CHROMOTOPIC LANDSCAPES and PHOTONICS
On the Special Exhibition
Presented as part of the Chromotopia art project, this exhibition features the photographic works of Victoria Coeln. Her Chromotopic Landscapes can be interpreted as a form of inverted landscape painting: instead of transforming a landscape into an image through traditional painting techniques, she employs light to project painterly compositions back into the landscape. Through this chromotopic process, Coeln creates a new representation of the landscape, and in doing so, gives rise to a new reality.
Also on display are the Photonics, a collection of works that align with the tradition of Abstract Photography. This body of work is grounded in the concept of painting with particles of light. The title references individual light particles known as photons, which enter the human eye at varying wavelengths, producing a vast spectrum of color and sensory impressions within the nanometer range. The wavelengths of visible light range between 380 and 780 nanometers, encompassing both ultraviolet and infrared, which remain invisible to the naked eye. The Photonics series showcases millimeter-scale excerpts from Victoria Coeln’s Chromotopes.
The centerpiece of the Magnifying Objects featured in the exhibition consists of large-format analog photographs. For these staged compositions, Victoria Coeln constructs chromotopic light interventions at various locations around the globe, which she typically captures photographically during the early morning hours.