02-02-2021

Sarah Sze’s Night into Day at Fondation Cartier

Sarah Sze,

Edouard Caupeil, Luc Boegly, Thibaut Voisin,

Paris,

Exhibitions,

American artist Sara Sze’s immersive exhibition Night into Day at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris is still closed, but it has been integrated with a smartphone application. Night Vision 20/20 is an app that immerses users in the artist’s world and invites them to join in a playful, intimate form of exploration.



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Sarah Sze’s Night into Day at Fondation Cartier
French museums closed at the end of October 2020, only 4 days after the opening of artist Sarah Sze’s solo show Night into Day at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain: an immersive installation that transforms visitors’ experience and perception of Jean Nouvel’s iconic building.
In Night into Day, an exhibition curated by Leanne Sacramone with the assistance of Maëlle Coatleven, American artist Sarah Sze (1969), known for her intricate assemblages of everyday objects blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture, explores how the proliferation of images, printed in magazines, collected from the web and even intercepted from outer space, radically change our relationship with objects, time and memory. Blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, mirage and reality, past and present, her new installation brings together architectural elements, sculpture and film for the first time in the artist’s career to form a whole which alters visitors’ perception of space and time.
Fondation Cartier is itself a part of Sarah Sze’s installation. In an interview with Jean Nouvel, she said she was “considering the entire building of the Fondation Cartier as a light box of fleeting reflections and images.” To this she added two sculptures, one in the form of a planetarium and the other of a pendulum. Working with the transparency of Nouvel’s architecture, the artist projects images in motion onto the glass walls of the ground-floor galleries, transforming the building into a magic lantern. Sze combines disparate visual content which spectators connect as they move through the space, seeing and interpreting the images to create their own narration of the work. 
The creative act takes place in the eye and experience of the visitor, who may now be located anywhere in the world, using a special app, because Fondation Cartier has produced an app for the Night into Day exhibition, called Night Vision 20/20, Sarah Sze’s first work employing augmented reality. 
Developed in partnership with digital agency Cher Ami, the app is composed of videos of the Twice Twilight and Tracing Fallen Sky installations which form the two parts of the exhibition. Video segments overlap with reality and transform the way we perceive it, taking users into a dreamlike nocturnal environment. The dream-like AR experience is intensified by a soundtrack created by Sarah Sze herself.
Just as Sze’s installations question the concepts of time, space and memory, the app underlines our difficulty discerning between image and reality, in that the two overlap on the telephone screen just as they do in our minds, giving rise to something new and unique and perpetuating art even when the museums are closed.

Christiane Bürklein

Exhibition: Sarah Sze - Night into Day
curated by Leanne Sacramone with the assistance of Maëlle Coatleven
at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris
24 October 2020 to 25 April 2021
App: Night Vision – on Google Play and Apple Store
More information: https://www.fondationcartier.com/en/
Images: refer to legend - © Sarah Sze Photo © Luc Boegly © Edouard Caupeil © Thibaut Voisin

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