parquet mauritania: Exploring points of view from Tycho Brahe's castle

David Secko, contributor

(Image: Courtesy Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris/Sean Kelly Gallery, NY ? Laurent Grasso/ADAGP 2013)

Laurent Grasso?s Uraniborg is a modern musing on space and time. The exhibition at the Mus?e d?Art Contemporain de Montr?al (MAC), Canada, captures a distant feeling about astronomical observations. Bringing the unreachable depths of the cosmos into a space we can physically experience has profound effects on our perception of the world and the universe. And Uraniborg has done this before.

In 1560, a solar eclipse is said to have awoken Tycho Brahe?s interest in astronomy. Brahe, whose 1572 observations of a bright star in the constellation of Cassiopeia (among other works) made him famous, started studying astronomy without parental permission only to be forgiven due to his talent for groundbreakingly meticulous and accurate observation.

So important was Brahe?s work to the Danish that he was given the island of Hven - a small Swedish island in the ?resund strait - in 1576 as a fief by Danish King Frederick II to ensure he remained in the country. There he built Uraniborg, or ?Castle of Urania?, named after the muse of astronomy. Remarked to be the finest observatory in Europe, the castle had rooms for visiting scientists, a laboratory and library, and was the last observatory built for observing the sky with the naked eye. At Uraniborg, Brahe helped to revolutionise astronomical instrumentation and to show that the heavens were not immutable.

The Tycho Brahe Museum calls Uraniborg ?a completely new scientific institution that was completely unique at that time?. Brahe worked at the same time as Kepler and Galileo - a host of great minds completely captured by space and time, and our place in it. Together their work revolutionised our perception of our place in the heavens, a revolution built on the foundations of accurate observation from Earth. Just as the observation of space in terms of time changed our perspective, so for all of us space and time are devices that impact our perception.

Laurent Grasso plays with these very devices in his thought-provoking exhibition, drawing connections between science, senses and surveillance to ask questions about our relationship with scientific, religious and military institutions.

For Grasso?s Uraniborg, the architecture of MAC itself has been altered to echo Brahe?s castle, of which today virtually no trace exists. Destroyed shortly after the astronomer?s death, the erasure of his 16th-century observatory is an inescapable presence as Grasso presents a dark narrow passageway upon entering the exhibit, which leads to a series of dim rooms. There is an instant feeling that you can, and perhaps should, get lost.

Visitors stop at the front of the first dark passageway, the end of which is hard to see, hesitating until recorded voices from deeper within Uraniborg make it seem OK to move on. There are square holes cut in the hallway?s walls. The first reveals a projection of greens, browns and blues that is fuzzy and hard to make out. Openings in the wall on the other side reveal a room you cannot enter, filled with objects such as a figurine of a warrior, paintings from Grasso?s Studies into the Past, and the 15th-century military book Opera de Facti e Precepti Militari depicting military machines.

The distance you are forced to keep from this first room you cannot enter (other rooms replicate the effect) is disorienting, even frustrating, as objects like the Opera de Facti e Precepti Militari look beautiful but you cannot get close enough to be sure.

This is one of the exhibit?s most powerful effects: it forces you to continually change your point of view, to examine the distance you keep from presented objects and to decide how much time you should spend in each room. By generating this distance, Grasso questions your position in space within the microcosm of Uraniborg.

Moving on through the dark hallways, bright white neon signs name projection rooms. The Silent Movie projects a silent video of military architecture of the coast of Cartagena, flashing back and forth from the viewpoint of an attacker to that of the besieged, drawing attention to the notion of surveillance which pervaded Brahe?s time. The fuzzy greens, browns and blues from the entrance hallway turn out to be the back of the screen from The Silent Movie room. Surveillance is also emphasised in On Air, which displays beautiful video from a falcon with a tiny camera fitted to it, the sounds of which emphasise floating on air. Set against the backdrop of Obama?s recent tussles over drone warfare, the installation takes on added significance.? One of the final rooms shows the sparkling stars over the Vatican in Rome - an institution both of research and of repression in Brahe?s time.

Each projection room is one step deeper into the Uraniborg, one step deeper into questions about how much we really know about our world under the vast Vatican sky.

The press release from the MAC points to Grasso using the history of Renaissance science, history like Brahe?s, to consider the theme of celestial observation. Grasso is quoted as saying:

The idea is to construct a floating viewpoint, thereby producing a discrepancy in relation to reality. We move from one space to another, and that?s also how we create states of consciousness.

Not every object in the exhibition elicits discrepancies in viewpoint or panoptic constructions, but Uraniborg is satisfying as an observatory, especially in the tradition of observing with the naked eye.

Uraniborg is at the MAC, Montreal, Canada, until 28 April.