Carsten Nicolai's Atlas Borealis at Pinksummer, Genoa

Carsten Nicolai presents 'Atlas Borealis' at Pinksummer gallery in Genoa, a series of drawings based on chance operations and celestial maps. The exhibition references the Parker Solar Probe (PSP), launched in 2018, which became the closest artificial object to the Sun on October 29, 2018. In 2020, Johns Hopkins University published a sonification of the solar wind's electromagnetic waves on SoundCloud. Nicolai's work incorporates extracts from Antonin Becvár's 'Atlas Borealis' and features sixteen random compositions resembling lottery draws—German lottery numbers are six, Italian five. The artist connects these chance-based constellations to the idea of a hypothetical atlas of the universe's sound, evoking historical concepts from Pythagoras, Boethius, and Kepler. The exhibition includes framed drawings on white walls, with circles drawn randomly on celestial map sections. Nicolai describes sound as a universal language in the press release.