BREMEN.- With her large outdoor sculpture Terminal, the Polish artist Karolina Halatek invites us to make a special experience in the dark: When entering the large tube, viewers are completely immersed in the bright LED, which encloses them on all sides. Due to the total illumination, bodies do not cast shadows – a surreal situation, unfamiliar in everyday life. The artist was inspired by descriptions of near-death experiences in which light plays a fundamental role. Appropriately, she has chosen the title. The English term Terminal is a synonym for the last stop of a train or a bus. It is also used to describe the building where travellers wait for their next flight at the airport. Instead of imitating the depictions of the near-death experiences artistically, Halatek creates a new sensory experience which occurs between entering and exiting the tube. After having passed the tunnel, the viewer is released into the dark, urban surrounding. One’s own shadow becomes again visible in the light of the street lamps.

The sculpture is a temporary installation in front of the Kunsthalle Bremen within the jazzahead! Festival 2018. The partner country of this year’s jazzahead! Festival is Poland. The installation was made possible by the city of Gerlingen, the culture region Stuttgart, in cooperation with the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the a-i-r Laboratory Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw) and the Robert Bosch GmbH.

Terminal is a light space, that shines alone at night, separate from the outside world and yet open at both ends, a passage and a space of other kind at the same time, that dissolves in light. In art, light means enactment and dramatization, in this way the light space is a stage on which one gets isolated from the outside world as a spectator, but stands in the spotlight at the same time seen by everyone. At nights the Terminal is a light source: a star, that shines on the square, a shining riddle, that strangely isn’t media nor street light, pointless, but therefore very poetic; it invites one to make a circuit to enter and cross the space. The passerby will remember this aura over the day. Since, when the light in the tunnel is off, the presence of the filigree white sculpture clearly remains.

Karolina Halatek doesn’t want to dictate anything to the visitors, rather she wants to force them to think. As artist she engages for an art, »that demands the whole attention of the spectator, an art, in which you will be dragged in, no matter where you are and what you think about.« With this statement Karolina Halatek coincides with James Turrell, the king of all artists who work with light as their medium: »I form the light«, says James Turrell, »[…] in a way that one can experience the light substance, that fills the space, not only visual, but as well physical…By incorporating a space in one’s perception it is possible to see oneself during seeing. The seeing, the deliberately perceiving, fills the space with consciousness.«