Katalin Kortmann-Járay and Karina Mendreczky work with installation as a space where image, object, and atmosphere become inseparable. Their collaboration treats perception as something constructed: shaped by material, memory, and the conditions under which things become visible. In everything is illuminating, light is not neutral illumination. It appears as energy, information, and imagination at once. The work moves between living and artificial forms of light: from plant life and bioluminescent signals to candle flame, gaslight, photography, and urban illumination. The candle flame and the night sky belong to an older form of looking, shaped by orientation, fear, wonder, and shared memory. Each form produces another relation between bodies and the world around them. “The city-folk had stars of their own; biddable, domesticated stars,” writes Robert Louis Stevenson in A Plea for Gas Lamps. One reference is an advertisement for the Welsbach gas light, an invention that promised stronger, cheaper, more efficient illumination. In the advertisement, an owl complains that this new light “makes night and day alike.” The owl’s complaint is comic, but precise. What was once tied to myth, ritual, and the sky is brought indoors, measured, improved, and sold. Industrial light domesticates darkness. It extends activity beyond the solar cycle and changes the rhythm of bodies, cities, and other species. Photography is central to this logic. A photograph is made by light, but it is never a simple copy of what was there. Like memory, it fixes something while also changing it. In the former transformer house, later used as a theatre, the installation returns light to a building already marked by electricity, staging, and illusion. Everything is illuminated, but nothing is fully revealed.

The installation is presented as part of POWER LINES, a group exhibition at Merlin Theater. As part of the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection’s international exhibition program, the exhibition connects global industrial contexts with artistic perspectives emerging from the Budapest region.

Curated by Krisztián Gábor Török for the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection in cooperation with Art is Business.