Carsten Nicolai: Strahlen/Raggi

For autumn 2023, FMAV Fondazione Modena Arti Visive anticipates a great season of exhibitions and appointments featuring experimentation, creativity, international music and young art. It starts on September 15, 2023 in the FMAV Palazzina dei Giardini exhibition venue, with Strahlen/Raggi, an important solo show by German artist and composer Carsten Nicolai, known internationally by the pseudonym Alva Noto, who for the first time in Italy brings together a major set of recent works and an original project devised during the Covid-19 lockdown. The exhibition is curated by Lorenzo Respi.

The title Strahlen/Raggi not only alludes to the physical laws of propagation of light particles and sound waves, but in poetic terms also to the energy given off by the object-work of art devised by human creative genius. While exploring the transitional areas between music, art, and science, Carsten Nicolai sets out to break through the human being’s perceptive and sensory barriers while trying to incorporate physical phenomena, such as sound and light, in a single immersive, multisensory experience. These Strahlen propagate following calculable and predictable mathematical and geometric patterns. However, they can suddenly become distorted, prompting errors or, conversely, self-organizing structures. The artist’s intervention on these physicals events takes aesthetic shape in site-specific installations and paintings in which a complex code of acoustic and visual signs establishes a close connection between the human body and the surrounding space, seeking to cancel out their physical distance through sensorial interaction.

On show are two large brand-new works v.i.r.u.s. for ryūichi s. I and v.i.r.u.s. for ryūichi s. II (2023) dedicated to his friend, artist, musician and composer, Ryūichi Sakamoto who passed away in March 2023.

In the central gallery, visitors are welcomed by transmitter / receiver—the machine and the gardener (2022), a site-specific multisensory installation inspired by Japanese Zen gardens which stimulates spectators to discover the abstract language of nature by interacting with a Geiger counter that gives off light and sound impulses.

Light and sound also attract the visitors’ attention to the two black-and-white versions of the installation reflektor distortion (2016), arranged symmetrically in the outer rooms. In a full, reflecting, and rotating parabolic basin, the water surface ripples and is deformed by the action of the integrated resistors and sound waves generated by the acoustic speakers that transmit to the observer a permanently distorted perception of the surrounding environment.

These three sound environments are separated and fragmented by two silent decompression and meditation chambers in which Carsten Nicolai’s rigorous analytical painting regulates and measures the material supports and the surrounding space. The series of paintings entitled formula (2016–18) is part of a larger ensemble of works on the translation of mathematical formulas into graphs, without forgetting visual art’s poetic and sensual side: the translation of mathematical formulas into graphs acts as a generative tool for the drawing process itself.

Instead, the installation ray collector (2022–23), an aesthetic restitution of a planet-wide parcel tracking project, has been made especially for this exhibition. In 2022, Carsten Nicolai posted 10 parcels to the same number of addresses on remote islands all over the world, all addressed to the same Mr Nemo (the unforgettable captain of the submarine Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea), asking whoever received them to return the contents to the sender at the artist’s expense. Each parcel contained magnetic tapes and photosensitive films which would be exposed to electromagnetic waves and radiation during the journey. Once returned to the sender, the invisible traces would be developed and digitalized and therefore made visible.

Carsten Nicolai: Strahlen/Raggi
September 15, 2023–February 11, 2024
FMAV Palazzina dei Giardini, Corso Cavour 2, Modena

Opening times during festivalfilosofia
Friday and Saturday, September 15–16: 9am–11pm
Sunday, September 17: 9am–9pm

Opening times from September 18, 2023
Wednesday–Friday: 11am–1pm, 4pm–7pm
Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays: 11am–7pm

Tickets: full price, 6 EUR / concessions, 4 EUR (Vivaticket circuit)
Reduced price with purchase of a ticket for the Smart Life Festival 2023 performance UNI-HYbr:ID

Free entry: every Wednesday and during festivalfilosofia

Information
biglietteria [​at​] fmav.org / fmav.org
Tel. during exhibition hours: Palazzo Santa Margherita, 059 2032919; Palazzina dei Giardini, 059 2033166