BERGEN KUNSTHALL | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

With a background in experimental film and video art in the 1980s, Cerith Wyn Evans has primarily worked since the 1990s with spectacular installations where a number of media such as sculpture, photography, film, text, light and sound form natural elements.

At Bergen Kunsthall the artist let the specificity of the spaces form the point of departure for an integrated installation which filled all four exhibition halls. With effects like light and sound, he explored the long stretch and the strict symmetry along the axis of adjacent rooms that is so characteristic of Bergen Kunsthall’s exhibition architecture. The work with proportions is a central foundation in Wyn Evans’ art.

At Bergen Kunsthall the experience of the vertical is underscored by a row of specially constructed columns which stress the dimensions of the space from floor to roof. The columns have been built with a large number of fluorescent tubes where old-fashioned filament technology also emits heat – thus making the temperature one of the exhibition’s central elements. Non-material but sensory qualities like light, heat and sound also help to link the four exhibition halls in an experience of horizontality – a totalizing extended spatiality from the smallest to the largest hall. The sound from several transparent flute sculptures also helps to emphasize the horizontal linkage between all the rooms, and fills the whole sequence of exhibition spaces with sound.