This experimental moving image and live event work reactivates Sigmar Polke’s Athanor (1986) through the lens of Systemic Constellations; a somatic and spatial method for mapping relational dynamics across time. Mark Aerial Waller draws on his own position as a contemporary artist working with experimental cinema, archives, and live formats, to explore the embodied, epistemic, and poetic entanglements between past artworks and present subjectivity. By reconfiguring the structure of Polke’s Athanor as a temporal constellation rather than a closed historical form, this project asks how an artist of one generation may enter into dialogue with, rather than reject, the aesthetic systems of another.
Reflections in Motion
Mark Aerial Waller,
Reflections in Motion: Temporal Experiments After Polke’s Athanor
"My practice engages cinematic form as a structural and spatial tool, reconfiguring the relationship between viewer, artwork, and context. I am particularly interested in moments when the familiar becomes strange, and when personal perception is revealed to be shaped by larger, unseen systems; social, historical, or psychological. Since founding The Wayward Canon in 2001, I have presented experimental reconfigurations of cinema at Tate Modern & Britain, ICA, Serpentine Gallery, and Kunsthall Oslo, as well a recent solo exhibition and publication at CAAM Gran Canaria. My video work is held in the Arts Council Collection and distributed by LUX. Systemic Constellations, originally developed in therapeutic and ancestral ritual contexts, have rarely been used in contemporary art. I adapt the method for moving image research, exploring its potential to map latent dynamics within archives, artworks, and spatial narratives. In my video work What’s Wrong With the Past (2025), I staged a constellation session using elements from avant-garde filmmaker Owen Land’s archive. This embodied, performative approach allowed for a critical reframing of authorial legacy and influence, not through rejection, but through complex, intergenerational entanglement.
Polke’s Athanor has been discussed in terms of reflection, oscillation, and alchemical reference. I extend this with an experimental methodology that positions Athanor not as an historical object but as a dynamic field of interaction, where different materials and temporalities co-exist.
The project engages Lacan’s concept of extimité; the paradox of the external embedded within the intimate, to frame the instability of subject positions in Polke’s mirrored and layered surfaces. Barbara Filser has described the visual experience of Polke’s Lackbildern (Lacquer Paintings) as an oscillation between proximity and distance. I propose that this optical instability is also temporal and relational: the viewer’s position shifts across time and context, encountering themselves reflected in materials both familiar and strange."
Mark Aerial Waller, 2025
Mark Aerial Waller, Reflections in Motion: Temporal Experiments After Polke’s Athanor
Exhibition, tbd