Artists Registry

Embodied Light: 9-11 in 2011
Installation by Tobi Kahn

How can a work of art speak in the wake of primeval chaos? What is the responsibility of the artist, whose vocabulary is paint and bronze, wood and light, to those who are gone?

Grief ruptures meaning. Art can be a small, still voice that begins to mend it—not by trying to represent those who are missing or by attempting to portray their absence, but by inviting all of us who live after them to our own imaginative encounter with the possibilities of memory.

Inert memory is not alive. The tribute the dead ask of us is not only to grieve over the horror of their oblivion, but to live with joy and fruitfulness in order to honor them. Like us, they dreamed of a future that affirms love, that avows significance.

Obsessed by memory, I have always believed that art can be redemptive, a force in healing the world. This sacred space consists of seven shrines, each encompassing an abstract figure, bracketed in solitude by an architectural structure; seven varied sculpted memorial lights, kindled daily; and two charity boxes made of plaques like those engraved in chapels with the names of the dead—but blank in unnamable sorrow.

In the center of the gallery is a floor composition of twelve panels, comprised of thousands of wood remnants from art I made in the decade since 9-11. From above, their overlapping shapes and the patterns they form of refracted light suggest an aerial view of the city’s density, loss, and sustenance.

We mark and measure time. In the spring of 2011, I gave by hand, ceremonially, 220 empty memory blocks of painted wood to my chosen community, for the 220 floors of two towers. Each hand-held block was returned by its recipient with a drawing or inscription that evokes a memory of September 11th. The blocks will be continually rearranged by invited New Yorkers over the length of the exhibition.

Anyone who lives in the aftermath of unnatural suffering is incessantly aware of time’s passing, of the possibility of loss, an abrupt reversal of safety. And yet here we are, bound to each other in remembrance, pledged to transmuting darkness, to creating a sanctuary in a struggling world.

Tobi Kahn