Signatures of the Invisible
‘Signatures of the Invisible’ was produced by Candlestar director, Michael Benson. The exhibition was the result of an extensive collaboration between thirteen of Europe’s leading visual artists and physicists from CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire in Geneva, Switzerland), the world's largest particle physics centre. The projects aimed to present artistic responses to theoretical particle physics.
The initiative began in 1999 and resulted in a group of artworks first exhibited at Atlantis Gallery, London; and then at Tshinghua University, Beijing; Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome; Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva; Gulbenkian Gallery, Lisbon; and at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York.
Although the events described by contemporary theoretical physics are often so small that they are known only by mathematical "signatures," these concepts have changed our understanding of nature. While art is generally concerned with the visible, the artists in this exhibition considered relativity, antimatter, and quantum mechanics, motivating them to experiment and to rethink assumptions about how the universe works. The participating artists visually animated the interplay between concept and medium and explored previously "invisible" or inaccessible theories of physics such as new perceptions of time and space. The works resulting from these collaborations reached beyond illustration of scientific theories to examine their meanings through metaphoric imagery.
Participating artists included Roger Ackling, who burned precise lines with sunlight on wood found on beaches and riverbanks with a magnifying glass; Jérôme Basserode, who presented large metal spinning tops to address the concept of time and its boundaries; a videotaped conversation between CERN physicists and John Berger, a distinguished essayist, broadcaster, artist, novelist, and critic; Sylvie Blocher, a multimedia artist whose video and film installation pieces explore otherness, representation, and art's political responsibility; Richard Deacon, a Turner Prize-winning sculptor whose complex manipulations of surface allude to the human body and industrial techniques; Patrick Hughes, whose painted reliefs using reverse perspective create an optical illusion of three dimensions; Ken McMullen, an artist and organiser of the collaboration who is an independent filmmaker and has produced works with, among others, the French theoretician Jacques Derrida and the Scottish poet, artist, and gardener Ian Hamilton Findlay; Tim O'Riley, who explores the relationship between real and visual spaces, often by incorporating computer technology and optical imaging devices; Paola Pivi, an artist with a long history of collaborating with physicists and experiments with energy fields in her interactive installation; and the late Bartolomeu dos Santos, who has produced an impressive body of public art in Portugal, Macau, and Tokyo using etched stone and ceramic tiles. Other artists associated with the Signatures project in the exhibition include Monica Sand and Gustav Metzger. For the grand finale in New York, Leo Villareal installed a sequenced light work on the scaffolding that enveloped PS1.