Alan Bogana

Alan Bogana is a multidisciplinary artist based in Geneva, Switzerland. His art practice involves sculpture, computer graphics, electronics, time-based media and holography, and his works are usually presented in the form of installations. During the last years, his research has focused on the exploration, real and fictional, of the behaviour of light and its interactions with matter. He investigates this broad field of study through various means, such as computer graphics simulations of impossible phenomena or the manipulation of translucent, phosphorescent and holographic materials.

He exhibited in Europe, in the United States, in the Emirates and in South Africa. He has been an artist in residence at the Swiss Institute in Rome, at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, at the Sommerakademie Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, in Cape Town with Pro Helvetia and in Zug with the Landis & Gyr Foundation.

Alan Bogana was with Nicole L'Hullier the first artists in residence of Simetría: a programme established by Arts at CERN and Corporación Chilena de Video and supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia in the context of its programme COINCIDENCIA – Swiss & South American Cultural Exchanges. Simetría is a shared residency programme that enables two artists in collaboration, to explore the relationship between astronomy and particle physics, at the CERN, and in Chile, the VLT (Very Large Telescope) observatory and ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimetre Array) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO).

After his residency, Bogana developed the speculative and fictional video essay Ionize, Ionize!. Shot in a scintillation detectors factory in the Netherlands, Ionize, Ionize! takes as its starting point the unique properties of scintillators - translucent materials that emit light when struck by different types of invisible particles. These radiation detectors are used in various domains, for example in airport scanners, in medical imaging and at CERN. Ionize, Ionize! is part of the exhibition Broken Symmetries at Kumu Art Museum (Tallinn).