space - speech - speed

1998

A strange situation: a projector illuminates a mirror ball in a darkened room. The disco ball reflects the light and projects a word through the room and onto the walls in a rhythmic sequence: ask or questions (as a verb or noun), marked with an exclamation or question mark. But what is actually going on here? Is this event culture or an art space? Disco or art exhibition? A video store for "low art" or a movie theater for "high culture"? Mischa Kuball's artworks pose question after question, both literally and figuratively, but just as consistently refuse to provide an answer. Anyone looking at the light installation inadvertently becomes the reader of a message that remains strangely coded despite its seemingly banal obviousness. The scene changes: Mischa Kuball uses the same formal principle, but with a series of illuminated disco balls that reflect the projected light in the exhibition space in a kaleidoscopic multiplication. They can be static or in motion. The projected terms and words now form fragments of phrases and sentences, such as "speed-space-speech" or "material-immaterial". The aesthetic and conceptual boundary between individual spatial vision and a comprehensive visual space is thus finally dissolved. As the viewer's movements in space and time become a causal component of reception, he is both a passive reader and an active visitor.

Work information

3 mirror balls, 3 projectors, 2 ceiling motors, 3 slides, space-dependent dimensions. One stationary and two rotating mirror balls projected the words "space, language, speed" into the cellar of an old brewery, which is now the Center for International Light Art, Unna.