Leuchtkasten, Stahlplatte, Plexiglas, Holz, Neon.
Light box, steel, wood, acrylic glass, neon. 153 x 187 cm. 2012
TERMS & CONDITIONS. 1 channel video, 20 min loop. 2017
the video work by Sylvia Eckerman, translates the English title of the initiative and exhibition “The Other Is Oneself” to 35 other languages. These translations - realized in intense conversations with many friends and people from Vienna and all over the world - raise questions about how otherness is included, or lacking, in language and thus demonstrate the complex and multifaceted process of how meaning translates from one language to another. ▸ more
30/10-19/11 2017
–light installation for the LED facade of UNIQA headquarter in Vienna‘s city center.
19-25/10 2018
–light installation for the LED facade of UNIQA headquarter in Vienna‘s city center.
Solo exhibition, 2012, Kunstraum Bernsteiner, Vienna AT
REAL, VIRTUAL, PROBABLE, CONTINGENT: a rotating hybrid made of a designer lamp, kinetic object, and projector projects this series of words onto the walls of the exhibition space over and over. If the room were any lighter, the words would not be legible. If the power suddenly were to go out (contingent), they would disappear along with the movement. What might well remain (probably) would be the previously read words in our minds (virtually), and what would still be (real) would be the apparatus as a physically static object.
Shifting States is the title of this light and word machine, which fulfils everything promised by both its name and its output. Provided of course, that some things could be different than they actually are—and it is precisely this option that is inscribed not only in the machine’s title but also explicitly in the adjective “contingent,” a word that regularly appears on the wall, which, taken literally, means more than just “at random”: “Contingency is what is neither necessary nor impossible and therefore could be one way or the other, or that which generally could be but could just as well not be.”1 Here, in the (real) exhibition room, this possible spectrum of being this way, that way, or not at all is present as a form of possibility because, in constant transfer with the three other states, it is not present before us in a singular or definite way. It could be said that in this case the contingent (which in recent philosophical discourse has taken on a high priority) remains continually related to the three other “ontological” possibilities, i.e., the real, the virtual, and the probable, and vice-versa. Based on just a few words and with a minimal degree of technical expenditure, the “Eckermann Modalograph”2 (as I would like to call the light and word machine) fills the room with a scaffolding of complex theoretical concepts referring to the general subject of the construction of truth and reality, linking traditionally opposite modalities and thus raising a great many questions. And almost in passing, the technical-functional aspect of the apparatus is provided with an aesthetic form that reveals its value as a work of art beyond the conceptual level.
This attribute becomes particularly apparent when Sylvia Eckermann’s kinetic sculpture manifests itself as part of the installation entitled Probablis.