Grammars of Light

Exhibition

Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo

Seeing Is Never Neutral

Ann Lislegaard
Cerith Wyn Evans
P. Staff

Grammars of Light approaches light as an autonomous and conceptual medium. Monumental installations respond both to the museum’s architecture and to the movements of its visitors, turning the act of seeing into an experience that is at once intensely physical and intellectually expansive.

Psychological, sensory, and conceptual dimensions converge to generate moments of unstable perception and open up new fields of experience. Light emerges here as a shaping force — charged with penetrating force, vibrating energy, and palpable intensity.

Owen Martin, Senior Curator at the Astrup Fearnley Museum, explains: “The artists in Grammars of Light present three distinct possibilities for how artificial light can be used as both material and concept in contemporary art.”

“Another exciting aspect of Grammars of Light is how each artist transforms the museum’s architecture—and how their work is, in turn, transformed by it. Many minimalist artists working with artificial light in the 1960s and 1970s—a crucial period for the medium—were deeply attuned to how their work related to the spaces in which it was shown. The works in Grammars of Light draw on this tradition even as they move beyond it, introducing more fluid, context‑dependent meanings shaped by post‑structuralist film theory and expanding light’s expressive and analytical possibilities.”— Owen Martin

P. Staff » Penetration

In the video work Penetration, a laser beam is projected onto the bare torso of a man across a floor-to-ceiling screen. The concentrated shaft of light strikes the skin with blinding precision, seeming almost to pierce the body itself. The scene oscillates between clinical detachment, erotic charge, and disquieting intimacy. Is it painful? The body becomes a site of conflict; visibility, a question of power. Light reveals itself here as an ambivalent force, suspended between medical care and technological control, while also suggesting aggression, exposure, and threat.

“In P. Staff’s architecturally scaled video, a medical laser illuminates and penetrates a body, suggesting that the boundary between interior and exterior is more permeable than we might imagine.” — Owen Martin

P. Staff » Minimum World

In Minimum World, light likewise becomes a force charged with tension. Holographic fans generate a flickering, unstable corridor of stroboscopic shockwaves, producing an environment that feels at once immersive and disorienting.

Ann Lislegaard » Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard, The Crystal World)

Crystal World fuses dystopian science fiction with post-apocalyptic landscape. While Ballard’s novel transforms forests, villages, and human bodies into crystallised light, Lislegaard develops a reduced, monochrome visual language in black and white. Her shadow-world opens a space for imagination and alternative possibility. The digital animation creates a narrative tension between light and architecture, and between time and nature.

“Ann Lislegaard’s immersive environment and large‑scale video projection isolates and expands a single aspect of a novel or play so we can consider it anew—light plays a central role in this process.” — Owen Martin

Cerith Wyn Evans » StarStarStar/Steer (Transphoton)

Adapted specifically for this exhibition, StarStarStar/Steer consists of six huge columns inspired by classical antiquity, distributed throughout the gallery and pulsing with light. Controlled by an algorithmic randomisation programme, the intensity and rhythm of the illumination shift continuously. Light asserts dominion over the open space, directing the movement of visitors and creating a dynamic interplay between space, time, and perception — an experience that is sensorially immediate and physically felt.

“Cerith Wyn Evans creates large, luminous sculptures that continually transform, hinting at the limits of perception.” — Owen Martin

“Yet the artists also have common ground. Beyond their shared use of light, they prompt us to reflect on how we perceive the world and, in different ways, invite us to consider the role of language in shaping perception. This appears explicitly in works incorporating text from poetry, plays, and science fiction, and more subtly in a work’s titles or in its form. The tension between shared materials and ideas, and each artist’s specific interests or subjects, is one of the central reasons they were brought together for this exhibition.”— Owen Martin

short clip » video