Light is the primary element in the artistic practice of Danish artist Astrid Myntekær. She uses light to transform space visually and architecturally through installations and sculptural elements. Light determines not only the way we see the world but also how we feel it. Light creates moods that colour our way through the world. In continuance of the Danish light pioneer, Thomas Wilfred (1889 - 1968), who developed the genre "clavilux" - light played with tones – Astrid Myntekær is also working with musical orchestrating and composing light. As an alchemist she is constantly testing, challenging and refining materials and technologies in new contexts and configurations.
At her latest exhibition Palmstroke, she worked with small-prefabricated light objects. They where made by sending high voltage through a piece of Plexiglas and then "freeze" a lightning fractal by a single hammer stroke. The exhibition was created from sensation that the earth’s magnetic resonances vibrate at the same frequency as our heart rhythms and brain waves.
During her residency at IFP in Beijing Astrid aims to make an exhibition called Filters. The exhibition will be made based on a light table where she will grow a exhibition over the next 6 months - from which she can find, work and research her way to here in China.
The exhibition deals with the filters we use, in a time when we are all preparing to leave the planet.
Astrid has a growing interest in weather. All life is subject to the sun's control. Even the most primitive blue-green algae have a pattern of activity that is controlled by the sun. Plants, algae and bacteria are the only forms of life on earth capable of taking energy from an external source, a distant star, the Sun and through the process of photosynthesis create food and energy supplies on the planet Earth. Plants create life from light. A single algae cell are related to their predecessors in the green plant kingdom that 2.5 billion years ago produced oxygen and created the earth's atmosphere, the blue sky and the chance for other life forms to develop.
Comparable to Fischli & Weiss' film Der lauf der dinge (The way Things Go) Astrid Myntekær wants to create a little closed chain system. Through little light machines and her own “stoner” science she want to determine the life-cycle of being from a Chinese way of things.
Palsmtroke （2014）