Borrowed Light is a large scale installation by Troika that transforms the Lightwell of the Barbican into a setting for an artificial infinite loop of sunset and sunrise. 

A suspended 20m scroll of slowly moving photographic film immerses the space in a continually changing aura of coloured light. Creating rather than recording reality, it blurs the boundaries between experience and physical spheres, natural and man–made spaces.
 
Troika often applies high and low technology to the use of non-material or ephemeral media such as light, colour or water to frame experience as something fractured and transitory rather than absolute. With this installation Troika continue their research into the ways technology mediates our relationship with reality and how the digital world increasingly reaches out into the physical one

Troika is a collaborative contemporary art group formed by Eva Rucki (b. 1976, Germany), Conny Freyer (b.1976, Germany) and Sebastien Noel (b. 1977, France) in 2003.

An installation using film, poetry, humour and CGI to create an incongruous image that references film history, utopian architecture and contemporary politics. The iconic brutalist architecture of the Barbican becomes a glitch, a window through which we might catch a glimpse into our future. Visitors watch as an orange hairpiece dances in the wind in perpetuity around the Barbican Estate, echoing the iconic scene from Sam Mendes’ American Beauty. The title itself is a play on the phrase Trompe L’oeil (Deceives the Eye).

Rachel Ara is a conceptual artist whose cross-disciplinary practice is non-conformist with a socio-political edge, often incorporating humour and technology with feminist concerns. A 2016 Lumen Prize Finalist, this year Ara was recently selected for the London Open at the Whitechapel Gallery, and is currently artist-in-residence at the V&A.

Key contributions for this piece provided by the artist’s mother, Kay Le Seelleur Ara. CGI and animation by AVR London. Projections by Christie.