What position do we occupy in our cultural, historical, and planetary environment? The question runs like a leitmotif through the work of Heidi Voet. In playful installations and performances, she juxtaposes everyday objects and places them in a broader context, thus also in White Dwarfs and Supergiants. In the unspoiled setting of the dunes, she distributes a large number of coloured, concrete-cast balls. Whoever looks closely can distinguish a variety of balls by the imprint of their seams, textures, and materials. The artist collected used balls in the community thus representing layers in society – from the golfing businessman to children playing on the beach.
Whoever zooms out and sees the work in its entirety, recognizes a different constellation. The artist calculated the position of the stars above the beach town at the closing hour of the exhibition’s last day. The placement of the balls reflects precisely the position of the stars at that last moment. Each concrete ball reveals itself to be a celestial body.
The use of colour is based on the Morgan-Keenan spectral classification system for stars.
The title White Dwarfs and Supergiants refers to the evolution in the life of stars. The ´White Dwarf´ is a small, dense older star that is at the end of its life and slowly dying out. The young ´Supergiant´, by contrast, has the greatest luminosity but burns out quickly during its brief life. In relation to the immeasurable scale and time dimension of the astronomic system, the visitor comes into contact with his own limitations. As the fossilized remains of a contemporary culture, the concrete balls confront us with the constraints of social structures and point to the place of, both societies and the individual, in a large symbiotic system.
excerpt from the visitors guide
