[Northern Lights]

NORTHERN LIGHTS

Year: 2019

Medium: Performance, Reflective Textile, Photography, Video

Location: Antwerp, Belgium

Light seldom belongs to the object from which it appears.

It arrives through reflection. Through movement. Through encounter. A star possesses meaning only because it is seen. A constellation exists only because separate points become connected by perception. The night sky is therefore not a fixed image, but a field of relationships continually assembled by the observer.

Northern Lights was commissioned as part of the Noordlicht Festival in Antwerp, an annual event dedicated to bringing light into the public spaces of the city. Rather than introducing a new source of illumination, Tae became interested in revealing light already present within the movements of people themselves.

The work took the form of a collective performance.

A series of cotton ponchos were constructed and fitted with reflective strips. Each garment was equipped with fastenings that allowed participants to connect themselves physically to one another, forming a temporary body composed of multiple individuals. At the beginning of the procession, the participants existed as a single interconnected structure.

Together they departed from the city centre.

Moving through the streets of Antwerp, each participant was instructed to navigate freely whilst remaining attached to the group. Gradually the procession expanded, contracted, twisted, and reconfigured itself according to the unpredictable rhythms of the urban environment. Individual movement became collective movement. Chance became composition.

Through flash photography and video documentation, the reflective surfaces transformed into luminous traces within the darkness of the city. Bodies dissolved into lines of light. The procession ceased to resemble a group of participants and instead became a shifting constellation moving through the urban landscape.

The work drew its inspiration from the aurora borealis.

Like the Northern Lights themselves, the installation possessed no fixed form. It existed only through continual transformation. Every movement generated another image. Every encounter produced another configuration. The work could never be repeated precisely because its form emerged through participation rather than control.

As the procession approached Park Spoor Noord, the participants gradually detached themselves from one another. What began as a unified structure dissolved into independent bodies moving freely throughout the landscape. The collective constellation fragmented and dispersed back into individual points of light.

An unexpected dimension emerged through the city itself.

Police officers guiding the procession wore reflective garments. Municipal workers cleaning the streets carried similar markings. Their reflections entered the photographic field alongside those of the participants, producing moments in which authorship became indistinct. The work expanded beyond its original performers and began to absorb the movements of Antwerp itself.

The city became part of the constellation.

Northern Lights therefore exists not as a performance about light, but as an exploration of connection. Between bodies. Between strangers. Between individual and collective movement. Between the visible and the invisible structures that quietly bind a city together.

Like the aurora from which it takes its name, the work appeared only briefly.

Its form survived not through permanence, but through memory, documentation, and the traces of movement left behind.

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