Charles Sandison

Sandison creates computer-generated light installations on exterior and interior surfaces, video projections that combine words, symbols and movement. In them the words travel in darkened rooms or on the outer walls of buildings, living and interacting with one another. The words do not form sentences, but even so their powerful emotional charge engages the viewer, or more properly, the experiencer. Exhibition visitors get the sensation of being on a space flight, moving through universes of words, on the border between chaos and order. The choice of words in Sandison’s works is not random. He has touched on subjects like evolution, biology, genealogy, genetics, artificial intelligence and particularly language in his works. The theme of the exhibition at Tampere Art Museum will not be revealed until the vernissage.

"The point for me is to be free, almost like an abstract expressionist. I express myself with computer code and algorithms (like brush strokes) – half conscious, reacting to the exhibition space. Dreaming in code. The code finds its own way into the world.

I want to use my technique in a very pure way, very raw and chaotic even though it’s complicated digital technology."

Charles Sandison

Charles Sandison studied at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland from 1988 to 1993. He has taken part in the Venice Biennale in 2001, the Ars exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki in 2006 and the Singapore Biennale in 2011. Sandison held a solo exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris in 2008, and the new Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome invited him to make a work for the Forum Romanum in 2007. Sandison’s video installations have been presented in interiors and exterior sites all over the world. Sandison has been a visiting professor at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in Lille, and he has lectured at the Sorbonne in Paris. Sandison won the Ars Fennica Award in 2010. He moved to Finland in 1995.