Andrius Arutiunian: Under the Cold Sun

Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer Andrius Arutiunian presents a new version of his installation Under the Cold Sun (2024/25) in the historic convent church, today part of the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg. The work explores the hidden forces that shape our perception of reality, narrative, and cosmology—blending fictitious constructs, psychoacoustic phenomena, and temporal distortions. Under the Cold Sun engages with the paradox of perception and truth, reflecting how fiction underpins and permeates our social imaginaries.

The work consists of three major elements—a mirror, a searchlight and digitally rendered organ sounds—three socio-politically charged aesthetic devices, each intricately entangled with sensory perception and the shifting grounds of both individual and collective self-assurance. Together, they form a ghostly triad that permeates and vibrates the entire centuries-old church architecture. A vast amount of light is beamed onto the dark surface of the mirror—an intensity that paradoxically renders self-recognition impossible. The surface, both absorbing and reflecting the light, becomes a site of disorientation rather than clarity. Through its cyclical waxing and waning, the light takes on the presence of a strange, cold celestial body—at once distant and intimate, artificial and cosmic—enacting a choreography that unsettles the order of the senses and mirrors the speculative quality of the piece itself.

In Under the Cold Sun the audience finds itself transposed into an alien symbolic order, one whose meaning remains obscure. The familiar sense of self-assurance that collective rituals once offered begins to falter, gradually undone by the radical otherness and dense, dark opacity of the arrangement. The psychoacoustic effects of the organ sounds, pitched with a non-Western tuning system, destabilise the cochlear and ocular senses and create a new speculative reality. The certainty of one’s own perception is also thrown into disarray, as both temporal experience—physical and historical—is distorted and unsettled.

The organ, which has a complex history of appearance and disappearance in the former convent church, manifests itself once again as a ghostly presence. Once a symbol of collective embodiment, its sounds slip between times, meanings, and states of being. Especially in a place where various ideas of community have long been celebrated through organ music, these synthetic and disembodied sounds no longer affirm the splendour or permanence of spiritual or secular authority. Instead, they reveal it as something far more complex, porous, and ultimately unresolved. 

Under the Cold Sun reveals itself as a contemplation on the unconscious of the political, where different times, cultures, and belief systems converge and collide. By foregrounding the affective and irrational undercurrents of community, often dismissed or deemed obsolete, Arutiunian gestures toward the iridescent, abyssal foundation of all forms of identification and social coherence.

Curator of the exhibition: Benedikt Johannes Seerieder.

A project part of the program Challenged Togetherness / Herausgeforderte Gemeinschaft. Supported by: Kulturstiftung des Bundes.