Object of the Week –
‘Dark Matter’
Gabi Czöppan
[translated from German]
The German-French trio Troika makes the invisible visible in its art.
Leonardo da Vinci already knew this when he drew and explored the squaring of the circle. And this is what the German-French artist trio Troika demonstrates in an exhibition that opened today at the Langen Foundation near Neuss. The museum is located on the grounds of the former NATO missile station on the island of Hombroich, surrounded by greenery. The futuristic concrete-and-glass building, constructed between 2002 and 2004 by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, is partly surrounded by water and extends six meters underground.
In a dark room, the sculpture Dark Matter hangs from the ceiling like a meteorite. This giant piece by Troika already caused a sensation at Art Basel in 2014. Anyone circling the strange object can hardly believe their eyes. At first you see a perfect circle, then a hexagon, and finally a perfect square, depending on your viewpoint. But you can never see all three different geometric shapes in this single sculpture at the same time.
The deep-black pigment absorbs all light reflections and contours. Thus we are forced to accept the seemingly impossible and to question our perception.
In astronomy, “dark matter” refers to the mysterious phenomenon of matter that neither reflects nor absorbs nor emits electromagnetic waves such as light. It is therefore apparently invisible, yet makes up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe.
Questions of physics and philosophy have interested the Germans Eva Rucki and Conny Freyer, as well as the Frenchman Sebastien Noel, since their time at the Royal College of Art in London—leading the three to found their collective in 2003. Since then, their art has explored how digital progress dissolves the boundaries between nature and technology.
In Vienna, they recently showed at the MAK how an AI-controlled robot arm chops up the last tree on Earth—a “Terminal Beach” on a planet destroyed by climate change. They call their exhibition at the Langen Foundation Pink Noise. The muted static is currently in high demand as a soothing background sound. As digital consumption grows, people are increasingly longing to switch off or dive into the black hole of Dark Matter.