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Horses kept northern countries for sports and recreation often develop a vitamin D deficiency in winter. To prevent this – and also to profit from other health benefits – horses are taken to special solariums, essentially sunbeds for horses. Elia Kalogianni (1995) was fascinated by this phenomenon. She decided to further investigate these and other places where people simulate sunlight to influence nature. The result of this research is SOLARIUM (2025), an audiovisual installation featuring a three-channel video, sound, and a sunbed. The video features various locations where artificial sunlight is used. Besides a horse solarium, these include a tanning salon, a poultry farm, and a greenhouse. For each location, Kalogianni selected a protagonist: an animal, a human, or a plant. In both the physical installation and the empathic video images, she aims to make their response to the artificial sunlight more relatable to us.
Just as in many of Kalogianni’s other installations and video essays, the central theme here is how humans attempt to exert control over nature. Here she focuses on how artificial sunlight is used as tool for manipulation – to keep animals in good shape for sports or recreation, to make plants grow faster, or to conform the body to a certain standard of beauty. The installation raises questions about the power relations involved in these processes. What does it mean that we, as humans, have become used to manipulating other species, often on a large scale, for our own ends?
Text: Sarah van Binsbergen
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)