New exhibition Crepusculum explores and questions established notions of ‘light’ and ‘dark’
The University of Melbourne’s Project8 Gallery will next week launch a new exhibition exploring the interplay of ‘light’ and ‘dark’, challenging established distinctions that have historically shaped our perceptions of these notions.
In this special international exhibition, the Latin noun ‘crepusculum’ – meaning twilight – serves as a metaphor for fluidity and complexity, highlighting the entanglement of colonial and material domains.
Curated by collective Cūrā8 and featuring Helsinki-based artists Sasha Huber and Petri Saarikko, Crepusculum encourages viewers to appreciate the nuanced subtleties and gradations that twilight can reveal.
From the Enlightenment through to modernity, the emphasis on light as a symbol of knowledge and progress implied a binary opposition to darkness, contributing to colonial and racial ideologies. This dichotomy led to a reorganisation of time and space and introduced artificial light to extend productivity, disrupting the natural cycle of day and night.
Cūrā8 says: “Crepusculum is an invitation to reflect upon how artificial constructs have shaped the world, the profound complementarity of light and dark, and the value of a move beyond simplistic dichotomies toward more integrated perspectives.”
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sasha Huber's provocative and materially exuberant multi-modal works explore legacies of colonialism. Huber repurposes the staple gun as an allegory for stitching colonial wounds—together with photography, moving image, site-specific reparative intervention and collaborative research modalities—to activate connections between colonial racial categorisation, memorialisation and transnational capitalism.
Born in 1975 in Zürich of Swiss-Haitian heritage and now based in Finland, Huber’s internationally significant work stands as testament to a deep commitment to artistic research and speculative mediations upon complex historical narratives.
Huber is supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
Petri Saarikko is a Helsinki-based artist and designer whose work integrates material artistic investigation with social critique and expertise in design and new media. His work implicitly challenges constructions of national identity, authorship and related political discourse by materially exploring tensions between “real” and “artificial” phenomena.
Regularly collaborating with partner Sasha Huber, Saarikko is invested in the experiential understandings of the world, particularly through the prisms of visible light and colour. This interest extends to contemplating how, for example, a painting, might transition from daylight into darkness, thus embodying the thematic essence of Crepusculum as a multimodal exploration of entangled social, historical, and philosophical domains.
ABOUT PROJECT8 GALLERY
Project8 is a contemporary art space in Melbourne’s CBD committed to expanding aesthetic languages of speculative poetic and material innovation through curated exhibitions and related events. The gallery also promotes exchange, collaboration and partnerships between Australian, Chinese and international artists, researchers and communities actively engaged in contemporary art and discourse.
Project8 is supported by a Collaborative Research Agreement between Arts@Collins International Gallery Pty Ltd and the University of Melbourne.
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
Crepusculum | 3 August – 14 September | Opening Friday 2 August, 6-8pm
Project8 Gallery | Level 2, 417 Collins Street | Melbourne | Wednesday - Saturday 11am–6pm