Tracing Fallen Sky: a conversation
September 24 2022
The American artist Sarah Sze talks with the French philosopher Bruno Latour during the exhibition Night into Day, which took place in 2020 in the spaces of the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Among the works they talk about is the installation Tracing Fallen Sky, now part of Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain's exhibition Mondo Reale, part of the 23rd International Exhibition.
Exhibition walkthrough with Sarah Sze and Bruno Latour.
Sarah Sze, Night into Day, October 24, 2020 – May 30, 2021
Tracing Fallen Sky, created specifically for Sarah Sze’s exhibition at Fondation Cartier in 2020, is one of the latest works from Sze’s Timekeeper series, begun in 2015. In this series, Sze investigates the image and the increasing overlaps in our experience of the virtual and material worlds. The pendulum, an age-old scientific tool designed to trace the earth’s rotation, inspired the structure of this sculpture. Sze has long been interested in scientific models as tools to measure time and space and to explain the natural world. Offering not only a visual but also a phenomenological experience, Tracing Fallen Sky explores our relationship with the impenetrable concepts of time, space and memory and symbolizes the ongoing quest to find meaning among the objects and images of our time. Sze’s immersive works challenge the static nature of art. Widely recognized for expanding the boundaries between media and fields, her work ranges from intimate paintings that collapse time and space to expansive installations that create complex constellations of materials, and public works that scale walls and colonize architecture.
For me [Tracing Fallen Sky]
is an overwhelming piece,
a completely transporting piece.
It takes over the architecture.
For me this piece is much like going into an internal space."
Sarah Sze
Artist’s biography:
Sarah Sze was born in Boston in 1969, and lives and works in New York. She completed a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1991 and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1997. Sarah Sze has held major solo exhibitions worldwide. As a very young artist, her first large-scale commission and solo exhibition was held at Fondation Cartier in 1999 with the powerful installation Everything that Rises Must Converge. Then followed prestigious exhibitions such as at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2003, the Whitney Biennial in 2000, and the Bienal of São Paulo in 2002. In 2013, she represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale. In 2020 she returned to Fondation Cartier with a new solo show Night into Day (2020). She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018, and is a Professor of Visual Art at Columbia University in New York.
Sarah Sze, Tracing Fallen Sky at Mondo Reale (15/07/2022 – 11/12/2022), ph. Gianluca Di Ioia
Mondo Reale is presented by The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, as part of the 23rd International Exhibition Unknown Unknowns. An introduction to Mysteries. Conceived in collaboration with Italian designers Formafantasma, it presents works by seventeen international contemporary artists.
