REBIRTH · ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS · LONDON
Nathalie Pozzi
The exhibition was a complex, multi-project exhibition, installed in the Royal Academy’s new space for art and architecture in Burlington Garden. As a landmark historical building, the installation process had to conform to rigorous preservation guidelines.
Many of the artworks involve the subtle use of high-end technologies, such as Tom Na H-iu, which relays an information feed from the Super-Kamiokande Neutrino Observatory in Tokyo to manipulate a series of LED lights.
Managing the installation involved coordinating the efforts of a team of hardware and software engineers, technicians and assembly specialists, as well as architects and designers.
On-site Project Management
Client
Mariko Mori Studio
Exhibition
Mariko Mori : Rebirth
Venue
Royal Academy of the Arts
Location
London · UK
Year
2012
Installation team
Angelino Artworks · Italy
Momart · UK
The exhibition takes the form of a journey that begins with an encounter with a gigantic jelly-bean of a monolith, a sort of cyber-age version of a Celtic standing stone. This is Tom Na H-iu II, named after an ancient mythical realm where the souls of the dead linger for a hundred years, awaiting their rebirth. To guide the returning souls back to Earth, the ancient Celts created special monuments as the sites for spiritual transmigration.
Mori creates a super-contemporary version of one of these. It looms amid the unsullied whiteness of its setting, glowing with vaporous pinks and otherworldly yellows, ghostly greens and pallid indigos — and every now and then a sharper blue flash. Shadows seem to gather and grow within it, then to curl and twist and wither again.
It’s hard not to sit on a bench and just stare. It’s mesmerising, like some outlandish lava lamp. But far more entrancing than the mere visual spectacle are the ideas behind it. The colours are constantly changing because the LED lights within the monolith are linked, via the internet, to a computer in the Kamioka Observatory in Japan, an underground cosmic ray research station that monitors the primal low-energy electronic particles known as neutrinos that are emitted in vast quantities during the explosive death of a star. The shifting patterns of Mori’s polished creation respond to their presence and hence link us directly to a cosmic moment. And, since these neutrinos are essential to life, coalescing once again to become a part of anything from new stars to our own bodies, our freshly heightened awareness of them is intended to heighten our awareness of the fact that we are part of the life cycle of the universe.
Rachel Campbell-Johnston (2012), Mariko Mori: Rebirth at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Times
