Biblioteca de Serralves, Porto
Lichtinstallation „Mário Pedrosa“ (Tobias Rehberger / Harzkristall Derenburg)
At the time of his 2002 exhibition at the Serralves Museum, Tobias Rehberger became aware of the Museum's interest in the critique of modernism in the Brazilian context, pioneered from the 1950s to the 1970s by, among others, Mário Pedrosa, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape. It was then that Rehberger decided to establish a connection between the Serralves Library and the Centro de Documentação do Movimento Operário Mário Pedrosa in São Paulo.
This piece is made of 77 suspended artisanal glass globes and a software that, once shared on the Internet, makes the light intensity inside the Serralves Library change according to the light variations occurring at the archives in São Paulo. This literal and metaphoric use of light - one of the artist's materials of choice - characterizes a whole family of monumental scale works by Rehberger, such as Anderer (ZKM Collection, Karlsruhe) and Outsiderin et Arroyo grande 30.04.02-11.08.02 (Centre Pompidou Collection, Paris), both from 2002. The first, made of 89 blown glass lamps at the time of its first installation in the museum that would eventually acquire the piece was shown at the Yokohama Triennial of 2011 in a version with only 59 globes, which were connected via the internet to a switch in the bedroom of a child somewhere in that Japanese city and turned on or off at the same time as the bedroom light. The second piece, made of 66 yellow glass globes and 22 Velcro
lamps, is connected to an external light sensor and a dimmer that modifies internal light according to external light intensity.
A distinctive feature of Rehberger's body of work, all these pieces are integrated environments, existing at once as artworks and as objects with their own intrinsic functionality. Construed around the notion of 'elsewhere', they question the relationship between identity and context.
Biblioteca de Serralves, Porto
Lichtinstallation „Mário Pedrosa“ (Tobias Rehberger / Harzkristall Derenburg)
At the time of his 2002 exhibition at the Serralves Museum, Tobias Rehberger became aware of the Museum's interest in the critique of modernism in the Brazilian context, pioneered from the 1950s to the 1970s by, among others, Mário Pedrosa, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape. It was then that Rehberger decided to establish a connection between the Serralves Library and the Centro de Documentação do Movimento Operário Mário Pedrosa in São Paulo.
This piece is made of 77 suspended artisanal glass globes and a software that, once shared on the Internet, makes the light intensity inside the Serralves Library change according to the light variations occurring at the archives in São Paulo. This literal and metaphoric use of light - one of the artist's materials of choice - characterizes a whole family of monumental scale works by Rehberger, such as Anderer (ZKM Collection, Karlsruhe) and Outsiderin et Arroyo grande 30.04.02-11.08.02 (Centre Pompidou Collection, Paris), both from 2002. The first, made of 89 blown glass lamps at the time of its first installation in the museum that would eventually acquire the piece was shown at the Yokohama Triennial of 2011 in a version with only 59 globes, which were connected via the internet to a switch in the bedroom of a child somewhere in that Japanese city and turned on or off at the same time as the bedroom light. The second piece, made of 66 yellow glass globes and 22 Velcro
lamps, is connected to an external light sensor and a dimmer that modifies internal light according to external light intensity.
A distinctive feature of Rehberger's body of work, all these pieces are integrated environments, existing at once as artworks and as objects with their own intrinsic functionality. Construed around the notion of 'elsewhere', they question the relationship between identity and context.