Anine KIRSTEN
Born in 1998 in Cape Town, South Africa.
Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.
Light is a quintessential element of visual art : light theatricalizes the world, and playing with it allows for emotions to vary and change.
From the beginning of her career as an industrial designer, art played a major role in Anine Kirsten’s work. She made use of her combined skills in design and engineering during her collaboration with DJ Dan Ghenacia for the Alpha Wave Experience project, resulting in a hybrid object, situated between artwork and dream machine.
Her geometric and luminous sculptures characterize her will to play on perception and volume. Central to her work, that willingness allows her to immerse the spectator into what could almost be considered a digital universe punctuated with Glitch-like visual effects.
She uses the space as a projective surface for colors in the style of traditional American light-artists such as James Turell or Dan Flavin.
Artworks comprised of artificial lighting normally appear complete only when they are on, whereas, turned off, they disappear, as if amputated. On the contrary, with her use of colored film, Anine Kirsten opposes that conception, thus giving her work a genuine strength and independence, independent in the sense that it allows her to constantly reinvent herself as well as her art.
Each artwork in the Tube Series comprises six neon tubes, each of which constitues a unique part of a whole image, only recreated through the perception of the viewer. With her chosen motifs and the regularity in which she places the tubes, Anine hints to the Op’ Art movement and its experiments centered around cognition and visual perception.
In that sense, the series is truly generous in what it offers to the viewer : if the neons
constitue the heart of the show, the colored cables unveils what could only be seen as the « backstage » of the artwork.