KINBURN
Personal art museum in the form of a computer game
As an artist, I work site-specific. I am interested in exploring a certain architectural space, identifying its significant spots and manifesting them via multimedia installations. My material is a moving image – video – a dynamic form of light imagery that adds an extra dimension to three-dimensional space. Using video as a light medium, I develop site-specific installations that merge with the architectural space, transforming it into a living, pulsating organism and thus redefine our perception of space. I can spend hours observing the interplay of sunlight with the light coming from the installation, how it changes throughout the day and how the work manifests itself in new ways as dusk falls. But the life of an installation is limited in time, and once it has been dismantled, its continued existence is only possible in the form of photographic and video documentation. As my works are best experienced in situ, I have always been faced with the question of how to document and preserve my video installations properly.
I’ve always imagined how great it would be to keep the works in their original form, that is, together with fragments of the architecture for which they were created. That way one could move around these spaces and watch the movement of the video installations. I have always been fascinated by museums like Donald Judd’s Marfa or James Turrell’s Skyspace, which combine art, nature and architecture. Having the same motives as these great artists, but recognizing my own real possibilities, I decided to build my museum in a constructed reality.
KINBURN is the form of re-existence of my site-specific installations in a digital world that is created in the image and likeness of the Kinburn Spit. The real Kinburn Spit is a nature reserve, the virtual KINBURN is a reserve of my works.
The Kinburn Spit is located in the north-western part of the Kinburn Peninsula, between the Dnieper-Bug-Liman and the Black Sea. It is a huge, ten-kilometer long strip of land between the sea and the Liman. In the 1990s, it was possible to live there in the open air. The only buildings on the entire coast were an abandoned harbor building, a dilapidated pier and two fisherman’s huts. As the area was a nature reserve at the time, it was characterized above all by absolute seclusion. I was there several times and once lived there for a month. When you are on the spit, you feel lost in time and space. As you move along the shore, the image before your eyes hardly changes. It is as if you are moving without changing your location. The shore of the Kinburn Spit is an ideal platform to contemplate the horizon, where from edge to edge nothing blocks the view of the boundary between the sea and the sky. If you look at the sea, the sunrise is on the left edge of the field of view, and the sunset – on the right. The sun and the moon, constantly appearing and disappearing with slight changes against the screen-like background of sea and sky, become the main characters of this show.
In my imagination, this place became an ideal being from Plato’s world of ideas, a being of which all my works are an expression. One of them, an installation realized in 2009 in the underground tunnel of KIT – Kunst im Tunnel in Düsseldorf and transferred to KINBURN in an underwater bunker, is inspired by the night landscape on the spit: in front of the eyes an endless dark space, in which center a white wave constantly renews itself from edge to edge along the entire horizon.
In the world of the computer game KINBURN, I recreate my site-specific video installations. Each work realized in a particular space, together with the architectural fragment that is an integral part of it, is transferred to the virtual coast as a separate island. All the islands together form an archipelago along the spit coast. This world can be explored and all video installations can be observed in situ (in the places of their initial existence) from different perspectives. Some installations can be seen directly from the shore, others from a neighboring island, and still others can only be seen by climbing onto a particular island and looking inside the building.
I programmed the movement of the sun and moon so that the video installations can be seen in a constant change of light. I recorded my walk through the installations – KINBURN WALKTHROUGH – during which day and night alternated several times. In both the real and digital world, the sun and moon reinforce the feeling of continuity and change. I always try to convey this feeling with my work.
