Forecast
2023
Programmed LED panel, aluminium, ⌀ 350 cm
Location: Bastion Maria Theresia

Forecast is a circular LED screen programmed to display a live, animated image of the following day’s weather in the city of Timișoara. A built in computer module triggers the visual animations based on inputs from an online weather forecast. 

The work reads as a signal or an indicator of future time, and the faith we put into predictions of what tomorrow will bring – whether it’s climate change, cultural shifts or political upheaval. Mounted on the rooftop of a building with the sky as a backdrop, the sign reminds us of the sometimes drastic, and sometimes banal changes ahead. 

Forecast is a sculpture and a light work that reflects on historical change, as well as the feelings of hope we attach to the speculations of scientific weather calculations, which are not dissimilar to the fortune teller’s crystal ball. 

Forecast is installed as a temporary artwork, the opening of which will coincide with the Spring Equinox in March 2023. 

Umdrehen
2022
Single-channel 4K video projection with stereo sound, 15 min
Location: Bastion Maria Theresia

Susanna Jablonski and Santiago Mostyn’s new film examines the role of image making in relation to history, looking closely at how images of historical violence, and their appropriation, might shape our understanding of the present day.

Umdrehen juxtaposes audio from the 1981 testimony of a German naval sergeant, Reinhard Wiener – who partially filmed the mass murder of Jewish residents of Liepaja, Latvia in the summer of 1941 – with images recorded by Jablonski and Mostyn at the site of the massacre in 2021. The artists’ camera moves through the landscape in response to Wiener’s description of what he saw that day, taking the viewer into the same forested, coastal landscape and finally into the trenches where the atrocities took place.

Characterised as a wartime trophy, Wiener’s archival footage later circulated as evidence in the Holocaust trials and as material for documentary and feature films, but remains deliberately not shown here. The artists’ work questions the function and agency of the camera in describing history, asking how historical events leave traces in landscapes, and how one can approach, retell, or represent a horrific event without reproducing its depiction of violence.

Bio
Susanna Jablonski is an artist working in sculpture, video and sound composition. Often combining highly crafted sculptures and vernacular objects within an immersive installation architecture, Jablonski’s work investigates the ontological value of materials, events and bodies – how they sustain or disintegrate, and how meaning is ascribed to the places and times they inhabit.

Santiago Mostyn is an artist whose practice foregrounds narrative entanglements in pursuit of new understandings of place, both in a cultural and psychic sense. Santiago has long been interested in the interplay of music, narrative and the embodied self, with works manifesting as films, exhibitions and curatorial projects.