Sarah Sze in Paris.

In these times of pandemic and the accompanying restrictions it seems that any art event is only as good as its website. Faced with the challenge of putting on a show that may have to close to the public at short notice some galleries have been more successful than others in reaching an online audience. The upside to this situation is that we now can visit a show virtually which would have been difficult to visit physically even in good times, due to time and cost considerations.

One such show is From Night to Day by Sarah Sze at Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. The artist has made two installations for the ground floor of the iconic glass and steel 1994 Jean Nouvel building that change as the light fades and become increasingly visible from the outside as night falls. A great show for winter in the Northern hemisphere. The two pieces Twice Twilight and Tracing Fallen Sky form part of the Timekeeper series started in 2015 and revisit the starting points of planetarium and pendulum explored in her Triple Point installations for the Venice Biennale in 2013.

The Foundation Cartier website allows the online visitor to experience the work with the help of a youtube link to four excellent videos. The first two take each installation separately and the third connects them with the building. The viewer glimpses the artist walking through the space but there is no commentary – simply the ambient sounds that accompany the installations. These very short videos use shots that span a day so as to show the light changing. This same approach is used in the third video in which the viewer experiences more of the building and external sounds of the street. The forth video is 50 minutes long and consists of an informal walkthrough of the show and chat about the work between the artist and Bruno Latour who included her installation Flashpoint (Timekeeper) 2018 in the Critical Zones exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe.

The Twice Twilight installation is particularly fascinating for its apparent fragility and flux expressed by the fleeting nature of the moving projections onto it, together with the lightweight scaffold structure and flimsy paper screens. The projections emanate from a revolving stack of projectors so are cast across and through the installation, being thrown out into the space that surrounds the structure. That space also stretches beyond the glass walls to the Paris street. After dark, car headlights penetrate the building and the installation is bounced back in reflections amidst the moving images. I am hugely drawn to this work and would rush to Paris to see it if I could. The next best thing is to be able to watch the videos of it and to hear the artist talk about her work.

The exhibition is at Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 261 Boulevard Raspail, 75014 Paris until 7th March 2021.