15.07–​16.09.2018

With Yin-Ju Chen, Tamás Kaszás, and Sam Keogh

This Summer, Kunstfort Vijfhuizen and VRIZA present the start of The Mindful, a curatorial project initiated by Kerstin Winking. The project is inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). In this science fiction novel, set hundreds of years in the future, the Mindful is a spaceship, specifically an interplanetary freighter. The project appropriates the Mindful’s name, because like the imaginary spaceship, it also moves from place to place, each time entering a new context or ‘world’ and facilitating encounters. The Mindful Intervention at Kunstfort Vijfhuizen launches the project with three installations and a performance by Yin-Ju Chen (Taiwan, 1977), Tamás Kaszás (Hungary, 1976) and Sam Keogh (Ireland, 1985).

Reverberation of the Pleiades by Yin-Ju Chen

In what ways do the stars affect human life on Earth? Yin-Ju Chen searches for answers to this question in cosmology, conspiracy theories and philosophy, all of which inspire her artistic practice. American art of the 1960s and archaic patterns based on star constellations and found in global cultural productions, reverberate in Reverberation of the Pleiades, her new land art work created as part of The Mindful Intervention at Kunstfort Vijfhuizen.

Reverberation of the Pleiades is culturally anchored in the global human tradition of depicting and describing the Pleiades, a star cluster that came into being about 100 million years ago. The Pleiades are for instance mentioned in Homer’s Iliad and depicted on the Nebra sky disk. Astronomers say that the Pleiades star cluster is anchored in a deep past and it will last into the far future for about another 100 million years before it fades. In view of this time span, Yin-Ju’s Reverberation of the Pleiades reads like a contemporary reminder of the ephemerality of human life.

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