Out of the Blue

In recent years, the artist collective Kg Augenstern has focused their research on the field of energy and its relationship with ritual and art. In 2024 and 2025, they spent two periods on the Island of Pantelleria, a place characterised by strong electromagnetic fields due to its volcanic activity. “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” is the first cycle of art works from 2024, presented at BOCS in Catania (Italy), curated by N38E13, at the Larnaca Biennale in Cyprus and, in parts, in Zurich, Switzerland, and at Art Figura in Germany.

The second series of art works from 2025 is presented as a mixed-media installation entitled “Out of the Blue”, in  Retramp Gallery, Berlin.

Kg Augenstern returns to the island and follows the traces left within a mystical geography   that connects 9 points emerging from the furrow created by the signs of intuition traced on the gates of paradise in “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”. These are the places where, the previous year, radiation and electromagnetic distortion were measured, revealing electromagnetic fields charged with energy, as subtle as they are unpredictable in their dialogue with art and ritual. They return to those places and retraces their artistic narrative, renewing that attempt to push the art work further and grasp it as a synthesis between earth and the world.

Art renews itself by pushing beyond the question of being, in the expectation of a formless light, of a sign, emerging from the darkness, be it the abyss or the sky above us, and which, in its revelation, may precede death; the ultimate possibility of being.

On the island, the world manifests itself as a horizon of meanings, in which the earth remains mysterious, inexhaustible, beyond any complete definition. A tension emerges between the world and the earth, a permanent and necessary conflict between that which reveals itself and that which retracts. The truth remains veiled; light filters through the chink, as if from the doors of paradise. It comes from an abyss and blinds the view, whilst we wait for a reflection of it to reach, unexpectedly, this side of that threshold, before it is crossed.

The possibility that the lightening bolt hidden in the image ‘out of the blue’ breaks in, without warning, upon the world’s scene, thunders upon the earth, opens a chink and cuts across the sky in a thin flash of light, without striking anyone.

In a blend of the material and the immaterial that reveals and conceals itself, we move between light, twilight and darkness. At times it may seem like a game, in which the truth hides and we search for it. But there is nothing deeper than seeking meaning in the abysses of our sacrificial existence.

Kg Augenstern’s  art works open up a world and bring to the surface the tension between the world and the earth, into which ritual is inserted as a practice which, by suspending the ordinary and instrumental dimension of agency, preserves and renews the opening up of a world.

All that remains is to step into the exhibition and experience the twilight, moving as if suspended between light and darkness, in search of a subtle and powerful energy that emerges from an abyss, perceived as much in the light of day as in the darkness of night.

Ennio Pellicanò - N38E13

Photos by Hue Hale