2023
Installation for Trance, the main exhibition of Tallinn Photomonth 2023 at the Tallinn Art Hall Lasnamäe Pavilion, 7.10.–26.11.2023, curated by Ilari Laamanen.
For PROLUMEN UFO NOTE2, the starting point was the Art Hall pavilion itself, its architecture and the way it shapes movement, perception, and behaviour within the space. The pavilion is, in theory, an endless corridor constructed around a small square courtyard, a loop that could be walked indefinitely – a spatial condition that resonated with the idea of trance.
The work began to unfold once the space was envisioned without the truss system suspended from the ceiling of the pavilion. This structure is an essential part of the pavilion’s infrastructure: it carries electricity and supports the lights, projectors and speakers that make exhibitions function. It is also one of the first things you notice when you enter the space.
This moment of dysfunction, this glitch in the logic of the space, became the basis of the work. Instead of ignoring the infrastructure, the installation engages with it directly. A single fragment of the former grid is recontextualized; detached from its original purpose, it no longer carries light or electricity. Instead, it becomes the subject: an everyday mechanism made visible, stripped of function, and transformed into something else.
Light – fundamental to both photography and exhibition-making – became another layer in this transformation. The truss element was hung as low as the chain hoist allowed, with a variety of lights attached to it, illuminating one another, the carpeted floor, the chain hoist itself. In the video component projected on the floor beneath the truss, where part of the carpet was removed, the mechanism was turned back onto itself, directing attention toward the systems that normally operate behind the scenes.
The title for the work was borrowed from one of the lights used in the installation – the make and model of the pavilion’s maintenance light.