Marie Kølbæk Iversen: Star Messenger

PS/Y’s Hysteria programme and LUX hosts a screening of 'Star Messenger' a new moving image work by Danish artist Marie Kølbæk Iversen, accompanied by Diana Policarpo on percussion, and Gaia Fugazza's 'Other Ways' – a series of 90 unique porcelain sculptures to be displayed in the mouths of visitors.

The screening of 'Star Messenger' takes place close to Winter solstice and follows Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s recent performance 'Autumn equinox celebration' which took place at LUX earlier this year as part of PS/Y’s Hysteria programme. Expanding the artist’s research exploring the transformative potentialities of fright encountered through traumatic and shamanist processes, 'Star Messenger' proposes a softening of the historical western divide between the rational and the irrational, the material and the magical.

In 1610 Galileo Galilei published his accounts of discovering four of Jupiter’s moons. He titled the publication “Siderius Nuncius” – star messenger – thus naming the book after Io, the innermost of the moons. Over the course of two months Io had visually – slowly, but consistently – conveyed her message to him: That she is orbiting Jupiter. That the Earth is not the centre of the Universe.

Marie Kølbæk Iversen attributes the English translation of the title of Galileo’s opus magnum to her dreamy video work 'Star Messenger', whereby she questions what we know and how we know it, and suggests a collapse of scientific vision with the spiritual/mythological visionary: Both draw on sightings obtained through extraordinary set-ups that may challenge habitual world-views. 

'Star Messenger' has been produced in extension of Kølbæk Iversen’s artistic research at Oslo National Academy of the Arts and Aarhus University. 

The screening of 'Star Messenger' at LUX is part of PS/Y’s Hysteria – a combined arts programme that explores health and illness in contemporary society, focusing on issues of gender, race and cultural identity. Hysteria is curated by Mette Kjærgaard Præst and takes place in partnership with organisations and institutions across London from August 2017 until April 2018.