Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts

Curated by Malin Barth
Opening Friday September 20th, 18:00

The exhibition will be opened by Susanne Urban
Susanne Urban, cosmopolitan born in Baghdad, architect in Bergen. Member of the board of the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom – Bergen.


The three works by Lucas featured in the exhibition work together as a narration, starting with the single video projection of the work “Piper Prometheus” (2013), where an aircraft flies a commercial banner with the print of the formula that enables it to fly. The desire to be free from Earth and able to fly freely has captured human´s imaginations for as long as the time remembers. Thanks to the lift formula L= (1/2 d v2 s CL) and invention of flying machines, aircrafts were short time after implemented in warfare during the Italo-Turkish War starting 1911.

Lucas 3-channel six-plus hour long video installation, “Unending Lightning” (2015-), is an open-ended work in progress. Global cartography of aerial warfare, that shows all aerial bombings over civilians since its implementation. The project is composed around historical investigation that is endless, and grievously ongoing due to current events.

The three screens are synchronized and time has been condensed with images changing every 3 seconds; representing one day. The viewer is on one screen presented with the respective military forces responsible for dropping the bomb, date, and type of bomb, the city under attack and if known the number of its casualties. The centre screen is Lucas´s cartography indicating where in the world the bomb was dropped, while on the last screen documentary images and film footage are seen of the devastating horror of the act; damage, injuries and death. Unending Lightning has also been divided into three chapters. The first part represents the beginning of aerial bombardments until the first atomic bomb was dropped in 1945, then the second part runs through to the end of the cold war in 1989, while the third section is running through the current time also introducing remote-controlled drone attacks.

In “Ignominy Map” (2018) Lucas has left out the contours of the borders of her world map, and we are left with indication through her embroidered black bomb spots as a global web of devastation.

There are no winners for humanity in war, only losers.

List over organizations whose databases, reports and research were used extensively in this project.

Kunsthall 3,14

About Cristina Lucas

Cristina Lucas Lives and works in Madrid, Spain. She uses performance, happenings, video, photography, installation, drawing and painting to focus on the irrationality of human activities and to contrast traditionally conflicting concepts such as reality and fiction. Her works analyze the main political and economic structures of our time in an effort to reveal the contradictions between the official story, the true story, and collective memory. She enjoys challenging historical, social, political and cultural clichés and takes a critical stand on issues such as the position of women, Western domination and humankind’s ambition to control nature. Her work can be seen in many European museums, including Musac in León and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, as Manifesta 2018. Cristina Lucas is educated from Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, NL. She has a master’s in fine arts from the University of California, Irvine, US.