Petra Varl: Near Light

The exhibition Near Light emerged from the artist’s minute intimate, sensory and rational impulses to create a dialogue with an extremely enticing and demanding exhibition space. Petra Varl created a spatial choreography between four basic elements, which play with the artist’s and visitor’s experience of material reality and subtly connect it to the possibilities of the fleeting and transient. Through this the space is exposed to suspense between the material and something which is on the edge of the material presence, between the visual and non-visual. We are witnesses to a ‘liberation’ within the exhibition which emerges from combining elements that cannot be formally merged. Rather than with the physical inertia of mass or volume, which would fill the demanding exhibition space, the artist’s individually introduced elements are open and dynamic and try to break down the feeling of weight and volume and in this way show the simple beauty of the void within an architectural space. The exhibition Near Light is not merely a sincere derivation of the artist’s rational thought on the exhibition space, but also an intimate short story which reveals thoughts that are always split between experience and non-experience. The artist’s as well as the visitor’s.

Curator: Tevž Logar

Music: Ólafur Arnalds – Near Light

Clothes designed by: Uroš Belantič

Photo: Jaka Babnik, GBJ archive