In the space of a single moment, a few rock fragments shine at the bottom of a cave. The beam of light that reveals them then begins to climb through a narrow passage up to the earth’s surface. Before it gets there, it lingers in tunnels and lights up mineral walls that glow blue, green, and fluorescent. This is the beginning of a film by Yuyan Wang, but it could just as well be the very beginning of cinema itself: a light source projected onto the wall of a cave reveals images that, until then, had remained shrouded in darkness.

Centred on her film work and collection of found footage, Yuyan Wang’s exhibition dissects the raw material of cinema, which is artificial light. Titled Glowing, flaring, lurid, loud after a verse by Derek Jarman, it plays with the materiality of images and the way that light acts on our senses and perception of time. The exhibition places two films across from each other, one at each end of the ground floor: Look on the Bright Side (2023) and The Moon Also Rises (2022). The former, a montage of highly disparate images found online and documentary sequences, traces the origins of artificial light from the depths of the earth to our public lighting systems, by way of factories that manufacture LEDs. The latter, filmed by the artist in China, depicts two old people in the half-light of their apartment while news channels discuss the launch of artificial moons in our orbit. These two exercises in chiaroscuro exemplify different kinds of filmmaking: one, made without a camera, consists essentially of a montage of amateur documentary images, while the other stages a fiction filmed by the artist herself. While the endless flow of images and the desire to create new moons seems to push back the boundaries of darkness, the rest of the exhibition embraces a primordial kind of cinema. The power of our attraction to light creates its own images: a shadow theatre featuring insects as its main characters.