Born from a collaboration with artist Kamil Hassim and a team of engineers and scientists developing the SALT telescope, “Event Horizon” uses defunct astronomical lenses to cast a rainbow suspended in space, including the main prism of the Cassegrain spectrograph, which was once part of the oldest telescope in Sutherland.

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“Event Horizon” uses defunct astronomical lenses to cast a rainbow suspended in space, including the main prism of the Cassegrain spectrograph, which was once part of the oldest operational telescope in Sutherland. This prism, was once used within the 1.9m telescope to refract starlight, translated the details of interstellar data as stories to modern astronomers. In Hassim’s “Event Horizon” series the prism has been repurposed as an artistic instrument to express fundamental physics as an embodied immersive phenomenon that people can experience as tangible, enabling an emotional understanding of nature and modern science.

A rare collaboration in South Africa, the artist and his team at the South African Astronomical Observatory embodies the interdisciplinary essence of the work and, thus, exists as a gesture towards new ways of imagining the world around us. The largest optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, SALT, exists where some of our earliest ancestors observed and told stories about the cosmos. Southern Africa is the home to human storytelling, art, and science, yet our scientific achievements are not embedded into either South African or global cultural consciousness. This project explores how art as a storytelling language can bridge this gap in society and how art can function as a tool for new ways of understanding the universe.

Due to the way that prismatic light behaves as you move around the artwork, rays of chromatic light appear and disappear. The viewer simultaneously perceives and creates what they perceive - a reminder that in our quest to fathom the stars, we also decipher the intrinsic mysteries woven into our very being.

A short film by the same name accompanies the piece as an exploration behind the philosophies, concepts and places from which the work stems.