Karolina Hałatek
Scanner Room
Karolina Hałatek transforms {Bank Pekao Project Room} into Scanner Room – an installation designed specifically for the gallery space that engulfs this space completely, creating an environment constructed by light and filled with it. The form is minimalist, its most important element is a constant, monochrome flow of light that materialises and diffuses itself subsequently. The space has been created for people to be inside it; and in this case the visible is only the beginning of an individual experience that may be coloured with different emotions and states of consciousness.
Usually, scanning is used to represent images or to read encoded, written messages. Therefore, overexposure to light may be treated as a kind of a potential introspection, a state of concentration, a meeting and exchange with one’s own self. Its intensity develops with time and may get you close to meditation, but it can also take the form of a momentary flash of light, a transient feeling or image. The Artist often tries to reduce the initial idea of her artwork, searching for its optimum form based on clarity, simplification and focus. Similarly to her previous works: Cave, Iridescent and Enter me, she designs a space of experience constructed at the intersection between visual, architectural and sculptural actions.
Her practice falls within the tradition of art that uses light as a material; to give some obvious examples: the art of Dan Flavin or Olafur Eliasson, in whose studio she participated in workshops at the UdK in Berlin, and in case of her most recent work: some projects of Alfredo Jaar (especially Lament of the Images). For her diploma project, she designed a concert hall built with light that could change its form smoothly and thus influence the perception of viewers and listeners. However, her interest in light, time and space is not formalistic in character, it's rather situated close to various spiritual methods and practices aimed, on the one hand, at deepening self-knowledge, purification and, as the Artist herself claims, “deprogramming;” and on the other hand: at exploring the world of nature and science, and going beyond oneself and others, towards a transcendental experience.
- Text
- Kaja Pawełek
