Saana Wang’s exhibition 2156 is a compendium of space, time, and coincidence. The multichannel video and sound installation raise questions of visibility and invisibility; Wang invites the audience to examine representational imagery, and to possibly find new clues hidden within the limits of perception and experience. In Wang’s exhibition, the unpredictability of life takes on a visual and atmospheric form.

“On an autumn day 3rd of October 1925, the torpedo boat S2 sank in  the Gulf of Bothnia, and the whole crew lost their lives. My  grandfather had been assigned to be in that boat, but after a long night’s  celebration had ended up in jail. Would I exist, if my grandfather had  drowned with the S2 torpedo boat?”

In 2156, Saana Wang unravels the archives of memory through a constellation of interwoven narratives. Threads emerge from the fate of miners in the Datong coal mines in China, the sinking of a torpedo boat in the Gulf of Bothnia in 1925, a 19th-century painting of a hot air balloon escaping a besieged Paris by Jules Didier and Jacques Guiaudaus, and the HI-SEAS Mars simulation experiment conducted between 2015 and 2016.The narratives bend, overlap, and disappear into an unknown and mutable space/time spectrum.

Wang’s immersive ensemble invites us to be absorbed by the flow of images and to be entranced listening to a flood of sentences—a hypnotic gesture emphasised by a repetition of single events which blur our sense of time. In the exhibition, areas are accentuated by an ominous red light whose shadows cast symbolic layers—societal and cultural power structures, and private expectations that form our understanding of the contemporary world. Raised by the fragmented dialogue between a man and a woman, substantive questions about our existence and the coincidental nature of life itself, are intertwined within the fog.

On view in the gallery is a corresponding text to 2156 by Professor Harri Laakso—in dialogue with Wang’s artwork and inspired by the thinking of Michel Serres, Walter Benjamin, and especially Alain Badiou’s thoughts on love. Wang’s book 2156 was published in 2017 by Neuflize OBC, Centre Photographique d’lle-de-France.