Our beloved research project, Reflecting Light has come to an end n 2025 December. I hope this end is a new beginning, and we will be able to tend a bigger network of lighting designers, and researches in the field of light and vision in the future. Till then, I am happy to share the KASK site naming the research, and the pdf of the fanzines we have prepared over the years. I am very thankful towards Buda, the research group and KASK.
‘Perception of color’ is an interactive (collectively processed) lecture or lecture series that I
have created in my four-years research project ‘Reflecting light’ (2021-2025), part of which
was teaching students of the KASK theatre and arts school in Ghent.
I usually use a beamer with a simple sound system and 4 fresnels on a grand stand,
operated from a simple 4-channel mixer for live experiments. It can take different shapes
but so far the total running time of minimum 4 hours was needed for the frame my slides
outline.
The workshop is useful for people in the visual domain, may them be lighting designers,
technicians, visual artists, choreographers, directors, installation artists, students, etc. , but
it can be interesting to anyone who tend to think about what is it they are looking at when
they are looking at something. (People with non-normative perception are warmly welcome)
I relate to the lecture from my empirical engagement with color use from visual arts and
staged arts, and this is where the experiments are coming from.
The philosophical backbone is Arthur Schopenhauer’s book ‘On vision and color’ that has
been reflecting upon Goethe’s magnum opus on color, and simplifies the vision of color as
a result of one’s preconceptions about what is being seen, the perceptive organ and its act
of perception, and the object being observed.
Some very graspable exercises to test theory directly by the spectator are coming from the
late Josef Albers’ book Interaction of color.
(Vincent van Gogh- Wheat field with crows)
Throughout the lecture one can understand culturally and in terms of self-development, the
language and thoughts elaborated upon color and how that can contribute to methods of
looking. One can experience the vulnerability of one’s own visual apparatus and the
potential in being in touch with that vulnerability.
One can appreciate paintings and textile arts nested in different cultural heritages, and
how they create an impression on their viewer from an analytical viewpoint.
The goal of the workshop is to give participants a toolbox in asking themselves essential
questions from a visual point of view and inform their practice of looking.
The study of film through its re-implementation on stage with light and movement, taking both film and theater out of their comfort zones. An attempt to find out where the imagination of today’s audiences can lie and how idiosyncratic the dreams of theater and film really are in comparison.
A 3 month research supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR
Research partners: Silvia Bennett, Janne Ebel, Bilawa Respati, Yvonne Sembene
Many thanks to Anni Lattunen and Wiesen55 e.V.
Lime Rickey International is the superconsciousness of Leyya Mona Tawil, an artist working with dance, sound and performance practices. Tawil is a Syrian, Palestinian, American. Lime Rickey International emerged as a container for the world of lost homeland. Born of ‘noise and nation’ and displaced in time, she dives into a sea of ancient and future unknowns in order to describe diasporic confusion and craving. Future Faith is rooted in Tawil’s practice of Arabic folk forms, specifically dabke and tarab. Tawil embeds political sub-narratives and cultural confusions into Lime’s performance transmissions.
I had the absolute pleasure to work together with Leyya on her already existing performance, and re-stage the work through innovative lighting. I have heavily used comic book references translated to theatrical space, and color temperature shifts as indicators of singularity, multitude and otherness. Time is pictured as Lime must have experienced it.
The piece had me travel to Abrons art centre in New York and New performance art festival in Turku.
Photo by Jussi Virkkumaa
Future Faith features the following collaborators beside myself on lighting:
Costume: Scott Tallenger
Set: Tim Clifford
This generous artist’s curatorial projects like the Arab.amp is an exemplary work of creating new grounds of cultural exchange.
Trailer to be seen here:
This work has premiered in lock-down, and finally found its audiences as a video. In this particular time I had to find a new way to dance, the chosen area of my artistic work, as the social context of the time created obstacles for my usual and ever-renewing fascination for this language of expression. Samuel’s concept created an appeal, that was method and practice as theme (and resource). He used the musical form of the sonata and rendered it into a choreographic score. The two performers brought this score to space with a flawless technique, and I could relate to the spaciality and score in more than one ways of segmentation in parallel.
I set up a rig half LED half halogen, and let them contrast one another with showing off their own strength of ornamentation. Subtle shifts of color, orderly and chaotic unisons of the two sides were creating a man-made second nature that was easy to relate to at the time. Light as a landscape and as dynamic presence informing space, time and their ever changing perception was keeping conversation with the hour of dance.
Choreography, music, dance: Samuel Felhandler
Dance: Lena Schattenberg
Costume: Lise Lendais
Choreographic feedback: Alix Eynaudi, Anne Juren
Production: mollusca productions
Film: Elsa Okazaki
Pictures are stills from the video work.
Password: immerhin
Doos is an adventure with Mr. Hat, a curious, brave and child-like character who dives into imaginary worlds and captivates the audience with strange, exciting and funny escapades.
In his newest adventure, Mr. Hat’s imagination sees him diving into a simple cardboard box only to find wild weather, crazy creatures, a most unusual choir and a wonderful voyage through space.
On Being Ill is a sound and movement installation piece, played in a theater. The subject of the installation is illness, and its starting point is the book from Virginia Woolf with the same title. It is an accompaniment into absence, with an eye on all the non-communicated content of illness.
The narrative is a journey along the spine, embodiment of several conditions of illness, and where the illness is never an end point, a result to evaluate, merely a starting point. The body and the mind too is always looking for new alignments instead of judging the current condition. Could society perhaps adapt to such an agility too, turning its back to the good old dualistic habit of judgement?
The project is a research of presence, and is directed to explore the possible mental and emotional states resulting of acute physical condition. On Being Ill is driving our attention to the content of certain conditions, releasing them from their dogmatic brackets of dictated value. Throughout the piece the event of a ritual naturally happens.
This is the first movement performance I have directed in an assignment-based collaboration in which content, editing and dramaturgy (light and staging) was my responsibility. This methodology encouraged me to envision and direct further movement performances using my visual arts educational background.
Air is a 50 minutes dance piece choreographed by Miri Lee.
I got the honour to co-create with Miri. We worked together on her concept, that was based on Korean traditional dance, more specifically the breathing scale of it.