Curated with:
Juliet Kothe
In partnership with HOUSE, Autotelic Foundation presents A Shroud Woven of Solar Threads by artists Ala Roushan and Charles Stankievech at Halle am Berghain, Berlin.
A Shroud Woven of Solar Threads begins from a fundamental absence. Much of the ancient Mithra culture we seek to approach cannot be fully known. A ritual ceremony, a bell, an incense seed, a surviving image, a linguistic root, a climatic event, or a scientific model of the Sun become points of departure, weaving a portal into a time to which we have no direct access.
The exhibition proposes a continuum between ancient beliefs and current energy infrastructures: from early worship of the Sun in ancient Iran to emerging planetary technologies focused on regulating solar energy. Stemming from the artists’ fieldwork in Iran, archival research, and novel Artificial Intelligence techniques, Roushan and Stankievech offer visitors an initiation into a speculative dimension of time, where past, present, and future overlap.
A live sound performance by the artists titled A Shadow Takes No Room in Space will be presented within the exhibition on Wednesday, October 14. The performance summons reverberations of an ancient acoustic world, calling a lost language and forgotten tones back into existence through the striking of recast bells and granular synthesis. Fire, human voice, sonified solar radiation, and the ney instrument crystallize, dissolve, and drift in and out of time.
Ala Roushan and Charles Stankievech live and work between Toronto and Berlin. Their collaborations examine systems that seek to model and intervene in planetary conditions.