Solo Exhibition with Berlin’s Light Art Space

Libby Heaney’s solo exhibition Ent- opens on the 10th Feb at Schering Stiftung, Berlin. Commissioned by Light Art Space, it is a 360-degree immersive installation taking quantum computing as both medium and subject matter. The exhibition will run until the 1st May.

Find out more information here.

A component part of Ent- will also be shown at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, as part of BioMedia: The Age of Media with Life-like Behavior from 19 December 2021 – 28 August 2022. Ent- will travel in its entirety to arebyte Gallery, London in May 2022.

“Committed to new ways of presenting art, LAS commissions experimental projects, both physical and digital, in unconventional spaces. LAS is dedicated to future thinking and light is the foundation’s guiding principle – a symbol of imagination, discovery and innovation.”

“The Schering Stiftung promotes the life sciences, the contemporary arts, as well as scientific and cultural education. A key focus of the Foundation’s activities is on projects at the interface of science and art. This includes exhibitions and dialogue formats that bring together scientists, artists, and the general public.”

BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour

Libby Heaney and musician Nabihah Iqbal appeared on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s hour to speak about their audio-visual collaboration CASCADE which was performed at the Southbank Centre on 29th and 30th January.

You can listen here at around the 35 minute mark.

“Woman’s Hour is a radio magazine programme broadcast in the United Kingdom on the BBC. It has been on air since 1946.“

“Southbank Centre is the largest arts centre in the UK and one of the nation’s top visitor attractions. They seek out the world’s most exciting artists, from household names to fresh new talent, and give them space to showcase their best work.”

CASCADE at Southbank Centre

Heaney and Iqbal will perform the next iteration of their immersive AI music and visual performances at the Southbank Centre on the 28th and 29th January 2022. More information and ticket booking can be found here.

This collaborative project is part of Southbank Centre’s Purcell Sessions.

Through field recordings of the Thames, AI-generated sounds and visuals, as well as music and words, Iqbal and Heaney plunge you into an immersive world of real and artificial water-scapes.

In Cascade the Thames serves as a focal point for the pair, pushing them to explore the materiality, history, rituals and symbolism attached to rivers and water.

This project follows on from their previous collaboration, The Whole Earth Chanting, which explored the transcendental nature of human and non-human voice through field recordings, AI-generated sound and meditative composition.

 

Southbank Centre is the largest arts centre in the UK and one of the nation’s top five visitor attractions. They seek out the world’s most exciting artists, from household names to fresh new talent, and give them space to showcase their best work.

Ent- at ZKM

The first chapter of Heaney’s Ent- artwork is featured as part of ZKM’s BioMedia exhibition.

Commissioned by LAS, Heaney has been experimenting with quantum computing for a number of years. She is the only artist in the world using quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium and Ent- will be a 360-degree interactive installation taking quantum computing as both medium and subject matter. No fully fledged quantum computer is yet in existence but the technology has the potential to achieve results and speeds impossible with current computing. Ent- will explore the transformative changes quantum computing is expected to wreak on the future of everyday life.

Ent- is a quantum interpretation of the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1490–1510). Visitors will enter a black cube in which a 360-degree projection takes them through the layers of Bosch’s painting – sky, buildings and landscapes, and water. Heaney has used quantum code to manipulate and animate her own watercolour paintings, creating hybrid creatures inspired by Bosch’s medieval monsters, landscapes that seem to shift and breathe, and exploding structures that float and re-form. Heaney chose to work with watercolour in particular because the bleeding of colours into one another reflects the merging and blurring of the quantum world.

“The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe is a unique cultural institution worldwide, because it is a place that expands the original tasks of the museum.”

“It is a house of all media and genres, a house of both spatial arts such as painting, photography and sculpture and time-based arts such as film, video, media art, music, dance, theater and performance. ZKM was founded in 1989 with the mission of continuing the classical arts into the digital age. This is why it is sometimes called the »electronic or digital Bauhaus« – an expression that is traced back to the founding director Heinrich Klotz.”