As we walk into the radiating blue light of Mirror Therapy, we dissolve in the cosmic-mineral dimensions of the presented imageries. The installation consists of five projected slices of a single lapis lazuli rock placed in abutting slide projectors, together illuminating a large freestanding wall. The light of each projector passes through a thin slice of lapis lazuli, replacing the slide, creating an enlarged projected image of the material stone. As we walk along the expanded whole generated by the assembled stone projections, we find ourselves confronted with Rorschach-like images of mineral hemispheres, which allude to our physiological circuitry and hypnotize us with their beauty.
Taking cues from object-oriented ontology, Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s (b. 1981, Herning/ Copenhagen) installation nonetheless touches on a much darker reality, referring to modes of occupational therapy developed for amputees, and particularly applied in the treatment of war veterans from the 2001–14 phase of the war in Afghanistan, the place of origin of lapis lazuli. As we submerge into the blue fields of color we make a voyage through the actualization of affects, as the dual quality of the images suggests the East/West divide of war mirrored by our bodies, provoking the impossible hope of empathic transcendence through a reconciliation with mundane materiality. In this sense, inhuman fields become the basis for our amplified, posthuman bodies and a scenario for the outspring of material histories.
An affinity with the cosmic and the molecular runs through Iversen’s oeuvre. Her large-scale installations are fields of ethereal density, where one is invited to delve into expanded planes of imagery emanating from artistic, natural, and astronomical realms. Can the physiological apparatus of sight work simultaneously as a philosophical trigger and as a prospective medium? What spatial revolutions populate our perceptive hierarchies, and how can we challenge them in a poetic way? Exploring the neuroplasticity of perception and proprioception, as well as the cultural and physiological imprint of particular histories and methodologies of scientific production, Iversen proposes a space for altered readings of reality, where our senses are provoked to infra-levels, and where macro-structures are analyzed. MM
self-presentation:
I am alone with my one-year-old son, who is sleeping next to my bed. I therefore cannot set the alarm to wake me up during the night, but I am so excited that I manage to wake myself up a number of times—enough to experience the different phases of the rare astronomical convergence of a super moon with a total lunar eclipse causing the appearance of a blood moon on the Nordic night sky. I see it rise, getting tainted. And I dream about it all night: the projection of myself-as-part-of-the-planet-earth into space, the function of our astro-macro dance. Megalomaniac impulses, or: my dissolution into something much larger, which I cannot create or control, but that I may witness, ride, or resonate. This was an important encounter.
