Suzanne Treister at The Sapporo International Art Festival
Winner of Collide International 2018
The Sapporo International Art Festival (SIAF) is an artistic event held in Sapporo, Japan once every three years. The festival, scheduled to be held in December 2020 with the theme Of Roots and Clouds, was cancelled due to covid-19. The committee has made available on the SIAF2020 website details about the participating artists that were scheduled to exhibit at the festival.
British artist Suzanne Treister, winner of Collide International 2018, was going to exhibit three artworks: The Holographic Universe Theory Of Art History (THUTOAH), and excerpts from SURVIVOR (F), The Escapist BHST (Black Hole Spacetime) and HEXEN 2.0.
Suzanne Treister’s work engages with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research to reveal structures that bind power, identity and knowledge. In The Holographic Universe Theory of Art History (THUTOAH), she investigates the holographic principle and the theory that our universe could be a vast and complex hologram and hypothesises that, beyond acknowledged art historical contexts and imperatives, artists may have also been unconsciously attempting to describe the holographic nature of the universe.
Projecting over 25,000 chronological images from art history (from cave painting to global contemporary art, including outsider and psychedelic art), Treister’s video work echoes conceptually the actions of CERN's particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), accelerating at 25 images per second in a looped sequence. Alongside this colossal library of images is a soundtrack of interviews with, and watercolours by, the scientists at CERN which aim at describing the holographic universe principle.
Developed as part of the Collide International Award, a partnership programme between Arts at CERN and FACT, The Holographic Universe Theory of Art History (THUTOAH) is currently on display in Broken Symmetries at Kumu Art Museum (Tallinn) until 21st February.
Watch Suzanne Treister's interview at SIAF2020, including excerpts of conversations with CERN theoretical physicists she had during her Collide Residency, explaining the ideas behind the Holographic Universe Theory here.