400 Milliards De Planètes

Fri 5th
Sep
400 Milliards De Planètes

The Universe. A cluster of planets infinite in time and space. Represented through religion, legends and countless narratives, the subject of scientific scrutiny. Its connotations usually span from a romantic vision of the starry sky to a detached analysis of the astronomer.

In Angelika Markul’s video installation 400 milliards de planètes, unusually, the artist adopts the scientific approach to the Universe. Once more, Markul confronts the mysterious forces that humankind has failed to subjugate, this time – by tackling cosmic forces. Typically, art has favoured a mystical vision of the starry firmament, depicted for instance as random clusters of golden stars against a blue background in Pietro Lorenzetti’s (1319–1325) fresco showing the capture of Christ, or as the clusters of faithfully reproduced constellations in The Flight into Egypt by the 17th-century German painter Adam Elsheimer,  elsewhere, as dynamic spirals, pulsating with energy, in Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night or photographic maps of the skies created, amongst others, by Thomas Ruff and Vik Muniz. Instead, the Polish-French artist chooses to focus on the technical details of celestial research.

400 milliards de planètes demonstrates the rotation and functioning of a gigantic telescope at the ESO, the European Southern Observatory, in the Atacama desert in Chile. Due to its position at the top of the Cerro Paranal mountain that provides exceptional atmospheric conditions and remoteness from any interference from the human habitat, this is a perfect location to observe the stars. Angelika Markul obtained special permission for a short stay in the scientific complex, which gave her not only an opportunity to look at the heavenly bodies but also to see at close quarters the equipment for observing the Universe. Her sojourn at the ESO came to fruition in two works: Terre de départ (the Earth of Departure) and 400 milliards de planètes. The first of these, which harks after a more romantic vision of the Universe, shows the changes that take place in the firmament from dawn to dusk – in the form of a time-lapse film, edited from photographs taken at intervals of tens of seconds. This work is in a sense complemented by 400 milliards de planètes, which shows a different take on the same topic. The eye of the camera, focused on the rotation of the telescope, dwells on the technical aspects of the empirical approach to the Universe. The artist unflinchingly faces the powerful device with the objective detachment of a scientist. The incessant whirring of the rotating gears emphasises the ‘mechanical’ ambiance of the image.

The cool, emotionless frames exude a subtle, non-obvious poetic appeal. The looped image of the rotating telescope brings to mind a monumental organism in its eternal, painfully slow motion. The unsettling noise seems like contemporary music of the heavenly spheres. The incessant rotation of the machine can symbolise not only the infinite nature of the cosmos and the cycles of nature; it also invokes the leitmotifs of Markul’s art – memory and childhood (associated with the image of the merry-go-round), which can be found in the artist’s earlier video installations Le Gorge du Diable (Devil’s Gorge) and Bambi à Tschernobyl (Bambi in Chernobyl).

Angelika Markul’s work 400 milliards de planètes has been bought for the Bunkier Sztuki Collection as part of the project Experiencing Art: Enhancement of the Bunkier Sztuki Collection. Part-financed from the funds of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

In 2012 Angelika Markul was awarded the SAM Prize for contemporary art.

This event happens in Bunkier Sztuki

Bunkier Sztuki
pl. Szczepański 3a
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