Laurent Grasso "The Horn Perspective" Solo Exhibition

A remarkable scene from the audiovisual object-video spatial installation exhibition "The Horn Perspective." Laurent Grasso's solo exhibition, "The Horn Perspective," is on display at Gallery 315 of the Centre Pompidou from June 17 to September 14. Born in 1972, Laurent Grasso is a rising star in contemporary French art and the winner of the 2008 Marcel Duchamp Prize for New French Art. His work draws on astronomy, film tradition, and narrative literature, blending technology, reality, and fiction. His pieces develop mechanisms, modeling, and de-contextualization, exploring new forms of modernism through an archaeological lens. Rather than developing futurism, he structurally values the past and future, attempting to open up various interpretive possibilities in this post-modern era.

In this new audiovisual and object installation, "The Horn Perspective," a dark exhibition hall features a monumental Bell Telephone Laboratories Horn antenna transmitter at its center, constructed of steel and iron sheets, shaped like a triangular viewing telescope. A circular rotating wheel sits on the body, with a square laboratory behind it, supported by structural steel beams, resembling an extraordinary futuristic building or a Constructivist monument sculpture. This fictional object replica is based on the Horn antenna transmitter from Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, USA (1962), where two radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, studied infinite cosmic radiation waves. They received "fossils of light" from the universe here, an achievement that earned them the Nobel Prize in 1978. Simultaneously, this radio station effectively preserves sound fossils, meaning the original electromagnetic waves of the universe.

Behind this transmitter stands a replica of a Tesla antenna, once used for transmitting electricity. It was built in 1899 by scientist Nikola Tesla in Colorado Springs, USA, a place filled with religious delusions and emotional condensation, where he recorded extraordinary sound waves from space. On both walls hang large oval speakers, while a large screen in front continuously plays footage of walking forward along a path through a lush forest. Suddenly, a dense flock of black birds flies ahead and disappears into the distance amidst mysterious cosmic sounds. These intriguing and mysterious bird sounds, within the extraordinary audiovisual and sensory experience of reality and fiction, matter and spirit, imagination and surrealism, invite the audience to traverse time and space, moving from the present to a deep, ancient future scenario.