What happens when people encounter fright? Based on her own birth experience, which brought her in close contact with death, Marie Kølbæk Iversen explores fright in her work Star Messenger as a human condition and potential learning space. In the work, Kølbæk Iversen revisits her hallucinatory dream visions from the delivery room at Hvidovre Hospital and combines them with recordings from the Brorfelde Observatory. Inspired by shamanic practices understanding fright as a dangerous but extremely potent learning space, the work investigates the dynamics a look at fright beyond trauma can bring to light. Thus, Star Messenger is an extension of Kølbæk Iversen's research on fright as a transformative potential between non-industrialized and industrialized worlds.
 

The title of the work comes from Galileo Galilei's masterpiece Siderius Nuncius from 1610, which can be translated as Star Messenger. Herein, Galilei presented his discovery of Jupiter's four largest satellites, including the moon Io, which over two months — slowly but consistently — had conveyed its message to him: that the sun, and not the earth, is the center of the planets around us. With reference to this radical reshaping of how humanity understands itself in relation to the cosmos, Star Messenger asks what we know and how we know it.

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 Ida Schyum

cand.mag in art history