“The centre of composition lacks interest.” This is what we hear when entering the exhibition space, which seems empty at first glance: only a single incandescent light bulb hangs from the ceiling, its intermittent flickering correlating with the sounds of the artist’s voice coming from a speaker: “Don’t stay in one place too long… if you are not going forward, you are backwards.” Tony Oursler whispers a lightbulb’s eerie, poetic monologue, composed of seemingly disparate words and phrases about shadows, colours, contrast, intensity, energy, and the capacity to separate light from darkness and day from night.

Tony Oursler’s works often address issues of technology and human perception, and

frequently incorporate elements of the supernatural, psychology and pop culture. Talking Light is one of several “talking lights” Oursler made from the 1990s onwards, all of which explore the artist’s fascination with imitation, repetition, magic, mystery and that which is beyond ordinary human understanding. Though these artworks are initially bound by the constraints of the human figure, the technologies subsequently mutate into independent automata, which in turn become living creatures that are humanoid but no longer need to mimic the human form. The artist’s long-term interest in the reductionist quality applied to the moving image is taken to the extreme in this work, as it moves beyond the materiality of its founding technology, and it consists only of sound and light.

(Borbála Szalai)