Bettina Pelz – TASAWAR [3]

I am directing the TASAWAR CURATORIAL STUDIOS since 2019.

CURATORIAL BACKGROUND

For 20 years, I am working as a curator with a focus on light as material and medium in the arts. What started with one art-in-public-space project guided my professional journey that still perpetuates itself due to the outstanding properties of physical light that sciences are unveiling on and on.

When 100 years ago, László Moholy-Nagy asked to shift from pigment to light in the arts, he referred to the rediscoveries of physical light that accompanied the overall availability of electrical light. The new technical possibilities led to intensified studies of the properties of natural light, experimenting with the presence, properties, and direction of natural and artificial light as well as with the appearance of color, shape, and form.

Since the middle of the 20th century, the advent of digital media displays spreading backlit screens and projected imageries enhanced this development. Today contemporary artistic experimentation enrolls around a trifold perspective on light as the medium of appearance of the analog world, as the medium of display of digital imageries, and as a medium of visual perception, interacting differently with viewing subjects and their varying visual systems.

The wide-ranging array of artistic research and praxis that show a shift from pigment to light, from canvas to environment, from permanent to performative, from object to perception, from physical to virtual, from passive to the active audience cannot be summarized under the term ‘light art’, it is rather the esthetic studies or curatorial research that thematize the light-centered aspect.

In photography and film, on stage and on screens, for installations and interventions, in drawing and painting, artistic praxis pertaining to light as material and medium challenges the canon of the arts by abandoning art historic conventions and exceeding the art world’s standards.

My curatorial approach responds to a situation that demands reconnoitering the entanglement of the visible and the invisible scopes. I attempt tracing the diversity of artistic research and praxis on the interaction of apparition, presentation, and experience.

Instead of researching on a timeline, I refer to aspects, themes, and concepts that artists have expressed over time referring to light as material and medium. It is rather a curatorial association than scientific analyzes, it is not organized by reputation or art historic value but by the diversity of approach and outlook to broaden the idea of what we gain when reflecting on physical light the arts.

EXHIBITIONS

TEACHING

Since 2019 | Tunis (tn), TASAWAR CURATORIAL STUDIOS: Director
Since 2004 | Bremen (de) a.o., University of the Arts, Academic Teacher

CAREER

Since 1996 | Ruhr District (de), Freelanced Curator
1989 – 1996 | Ruhr District (de), Artistic Director of Art and Culture Projects
Until 1988 | Muenster (de), Studies of Philosophy and Social-Pedagogy

LINK

bettinapelz.de
facebook.com: Bettina Pelz

PHOTO

Ilkka Paloniemi