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Venue:
Kunsthalle Winterthur
Marktgasse 25
8400 Winterthur
kunsthallewinterthur.ch/

Partner:
National Cultrual and Arts Foundation, Taiwan

alexander levy


In the Oberlichtsaal of the Kunsthalle, Su Yu Hsin (*1989 in Taichung, lives and works in Berlin) shows the two video installations "frame of reference I" and "frame of reference II", created in 2020 for the Taipei Biennale as a collaboration with the German Research Center for Geosciences GFZ in Potsdam and the NCTU Disaster Prevention and Water Environment Research Center in Hsinchu. Although they are independent works, both deal with the question of how a section of reality relates to a data set created from it with the help of technical measuring devices. In filmic collages, Su Yu Hsin repeatedly juxtaposes filmed sections of reality with visualizations and animations created from the collected data, thus crossing the reference systems of field study, data collection, and interpretation.
"frame of reference" is a parable about scientific observation, parameters of visualization and limits as well as possibilities of a knowledge derived from it. Natural science always refers to data and facts, but meaningful instructions for action result only from the subsequent interpretation. And the selection of the interpretation parameters is to be understood as the determination of a point of view, which could always be different. At first glance, the video installation "Tidal Variations" (2021), a joint production by Su Yu Hsin and the Australian dancer and choreographer Angela Goh at the invitation of the Sydney Opera, provides a completely different system of reference in the side-lit hall. Along the medium of light, it combines the motif of the window with the element of water. The continuously moving ocean penetrates through the large panes of glass into the interior of the opera house and appears as a metaphor for the data conglomerate of the Internet, into which we also gain insight through screen windows. The bridge between frame of reference and Tidal Variations is built by the two C-prints "fluvial bedrock I & II" (2021) and the sculpture "Meshed Waves" (2022), all of which show topographies modeled on the computer. As in "frame of reference I", the raw data for "fluvial bedrock I & II" come from the Liwu River in Taroko National Park, those for "Meshed Waves" from a freely accessible bathymetric map of the Mediterranean Sea. As similar as the visual results are here, as different are the processes on which they are based: While the riverbed (above water) is reconstructed using photogrammetry, a method for calculating three-dimensional topography from two-dimensional photographs, underwater terrain is determined using sonar technology, based on the measurement of sound waves emitted and reflected by the terrain.