Abidish – IP4-Week 10

by creativeartsaber
May 2, 2023May 4, 2023

Mon 24th, Apr – Sun 30th, Apr

Artist research

Katie Paterson

Artist Katie Paterson is a Scottish artist based in the UK (United Kingdom). She works through the media of sculpture, installations, and craft. Her practice revolves around the ideas and exploration of understanding deep time. She likes to have a longer view on natural materials around us. In April 2022 Paterson displayed her artwork on deep time called the requiem. It captures billions of years within a single room, and it features 364 vials of crushed dust materials, each vial representing a different moment in deep time. This project has the feel of a ceremony. The materials used are very confronting and controversial. Some visitors to the exhibition were allowed to pour one of the vials into a central urn. This feels like witnessing some kind of story of building life throughout the time on this planet. Many described this experience as a powerful and emotional act. This project really gives you a broader and longer view of time and makes you think about your own existence as a human being but also about the things that happened before, and beings that existed before you. It is also a visual conversation about where we as a species came from.

Ai Weiwei

Born on 28th of August 1957 in Beijing China, Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist. He believes that art is a tool to open up new questions and explore the unexplored new possibilities and unknown territories. He is also a documentarian and an activist.

The inspiration behind his work is, his own lived experiences and therefore it has the quality of empathy towards other human beings.

His work Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds) is an art installation created for the Tate Modern in 2010. The artwork is based on 100 million sunflower seeds made of porcelain, back in his country of birth China. Seeds were hand-crafted and hand painted individually by 1600 people before covering the Tate Modern’s gallery floor (Turbine Hall), spread across an area of 1000 square metres. Originally people were allowed to walk on the Sunflower Seeds during their visits but later during the exhibition it was fenced off because of health and safety reasons. The concept behind the project is providing work to a small community of poor people In China. Another influence is that the sunflower appears in the portrait paintings of Chinese political leaders. Smaller versions of the seeds collection have been exhibited in several other locations across the world.

Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson is an Icelandic-Danish, born on 5th of February 1967 in Iceland. He is based in Berlin but also has different studios around the world. He is known for his sculptures and large-scale installation inspired by the Icelandic landscape. He uses the elements of nature such as water, air, ice, light and temperature to exaggerate the experience for the viewer. His large-scale sculptures and installation-based work is famous for leaving the wow effect with the viewers who were visiting his work in person. He also works with the idea of playing with the visual perspective towards the object.

In 2003 as part of a series, he created the project called The Weather project for the London’s Tate Modern. The sculpture installation filled the space of the gallery (Turbine Hall) not only with the size of itself but also the with the light coming out of hundreds of monochromatic lamps from inside the sculpture. The sculpture was placed in the middle of the space attached to the ceiling. To enhance the viewer experience, humidifiers were used to create mist out of the sugar in water mixture. The exhibition was an enormous success and stayed open for the public for six months.

This semester I studied many other artists in including On Kawara, Marina Abramovic, Lee Mingwei, Tehching Hsieh, Francis Alys, Jalal Al-Din Muhammad Rumi, Noam Chomsky, Hans Zimmer.