Mischa Kuball

Born 1959, he lives and works in Düsseldorf (Germany).  

The past as guide

Mischa Kuball started to specialise in light, his favoured medium, in the 1980s. Since 2007 he has taught light art at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. His use of video, slide projections and lightboxes has made him renowned for his stagecraft in projected light. His urban illuminations are particularly emblematic of his work.

In 1990 Mischa Kuball took over an office tower in Düsseldorf. For six weeks the floors and corridors were lit up at night, visible from afar as a pattern of vertical and horizontal lines of light. As its title – Megazeichen – indicated, the artist had created a mega-signal. Each week, new floors were lit up, in a kind of light choreography whose rhythm varied over time.
Four years later, the artist brought his theatre of light to the synagogue in Stommeln, which, after remaining closed from 1937 to 1991, became a contemporary art venue. For eight weeks, extraordinarily powerful lamps illuminated both the building and its surroundings. Turned into what the artist titled a Refraction House, this site with a particular symbolic resonance in German history embodied the emotional power of light. As Kuball recalls, “I invited the people living near the site to get acquainted with the idea and the possible ‘side effects,’ such as the strong possibility of violent attacks by neo-Nazis at night, when the synagogue was highly visible. I was pleased that the people of Stommeln created what I’d call ‘an energetic ring of solidarity’ around the work, which in the end was stronger than any kind of aggression.” With Passage public/Entrée publique, the installation he created in 2010 for the inauguration of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Kuball used light to underscore the changes in the urban landscape caused by this major project by using light to pick out the main pedestrian pathways to the museum. His numerous light signals indicated to visitors the path from the historic old city to the new city.

Platon’s Mirror, the work presented in Toulouse, refers to Plato’s allegory of the cave. It evokes the danger of believing only in our senses and the need to make an effort in order to attain knowledge. Using projections, sheets of aluminium, photographs and videos, the artist creates a space that is analogous to the cave and thus enables spectators to have an almost Platonic sensorial and intellectual experience. In this logical culmination of his meditation on light, Kuball reconciles the history of ideas and immediate sensation.