The Jewish Museum celebrates Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, with an interactive, multimedia exhibition. Eight works of contemporary art are displayed in unexpected locations throughout the museum, such as lobbies, stairwells, ceilings and windows, encouraging a spirit of discovery and active participation. The eight works have been selected for the different ways in which they use light as medium and metaphor. Casting light by video projection, surface reflection, or programmed illumination, these eight works illuminate and transform the museum’s spaces. The works reflect Hanukkah’s dual spirit of joyful celebration and meditative commemoration. Several of the pieces use light to play with numbers and mathematical principles, methods of perception, or systems of communication. Yet at the same time they are playful, the works also invite contemplation of light’s suggestive dualities: absence and presence, transience and permanence, literal and spiritual. An exhibition enjoyable to people of all ages and faiths, in a season of darkness Light x Eight provides innovative and nontraditional ways of experiencing light. Seven of the works are on view in the museum during regular opening hours. Philippe Parreno’s Mont Analogue is visible only on Thursdays through Sundays after 5:00 pm in the second-floor windows of the museum's brownstone building on 92nd Street. |
