[...] isn´t it essential to this feeling [of the sublime] that it alludes to something that can´t be shown or presented?1
Writing about a portrait of his deceased mother, Roland Barthes points out how photographs are images of absence, their way of inscribing traces of moments in time means that whatever is depicted is forever lost, as time can never move backwards. In my project Teleportation I have wanted to explore the other, and perhaps more complex, dimension of absence that photographs point to, namely that of bringing distant places into view.
The movie Contact (1997)2, based on Carl Sagans homonymous book, tells the story of when humanity receives a radio signal from an alien civilization with instructions in binary code on how to build a mysterious machine that will enable us to visit them. The scientist making the discovery, Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), eventually gets to be the one to make the journey, which turns out to be a form of teleportation, and she is awestruck whilst plunged through various dimensions and tunnels (not unlike near-death experiences). When reaching the destination, somewhere in the vicinity of the star system Vega, she finds herself in a strange earthly landscape reminiscent of a virtual reality environment, standing on a psychedelic beach where she is approached by her deceased father. It turns out that he is a projection, a communication avatar that the aliens have created “to make it easier for her”. He tells her wonderful insights about peace, knowledge and cooperation and invites humanity to enter into a phase of development that will lead us to reach their level of civilization. Returning from Vega, nobody believes her account, because the pod she travelled in fell straight through the machine that was supposed to transport it away to Vega. In an emotional testimony in front of the american Congress, we hear the following interaction between her and one of the interrogators:
Congressman: Dr. Arroway, you come to us with no evidence, no record, no artefacts, only a story that to put it mildly, strains credibility. Over half a trillion dollars was spent, dozens of lives were lost, are you really gonna sit there and tell us that we should just take this all on faith?
Ellie: Is it possible that it didn't happen? Yes. As a scientist I must concede that, I must volunteer that.
Mr. Kitz: Wait a minute, let me get this straight - you admit that you have absolutely no physical evidence to back up your story?
Ellie: Yes
Mr. Kitz: You admit that you may have hallucinated this whole thing?
Ellie: Yes
Mr. Kitz: You admit that if you were in our position you would respond with exactly the same incredulity and scepticism?
Ellie: Yes!
Mr Kitz: Then why don´t you simply withdraw your testimony and concede that this “journey” to the centre of the galaxy in fact never took place?!
Ellie: Because I can´t. I had an experience. I can't prove it, I can't explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! [sniffs] I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever, a vision of the universe that tells us undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are. A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not… that none of us are alone! I wish I could share… I wish that everyone, if even for one moment could feel that awe and humility and hope. That… that continues to be my wish.
Ellie´s experience ended up being hers and hers alone, even though it taught her something universal that she felt urgently compelled to share with all of humanity. As a scientist however, she feels obliged to abide by the methodological principle of falsification - she cannot rule out that it all happened in her head, that none of it was real on an objective level. When she is not believed she has no physical evidence, and no other testimony to back up her story, only her subjective account.
Her predicament is an instance of words failing when trying to convey an experience that went beyond the limits of reason and expression, a situation associated with the sublime.
The sublime is a vast and complex topic, but in essence it describes either objects or experiences that overwhelm the categories we usually employ to make sense of the world. Typically the sublime is associated with encounters with the terrifying power of nature. Importantly for my project, the sublime appears in the moment of failure when trying to explain or relay such an overwhelming experience. Through such failure we are confronted with the limited capacity of consciousness, and the possibility of something greater existing outside our world. One could say that Ellie´s experience in Contact was sublime, and its sublimity was confirmed by her failed attempt at conveying to her peers the experience she had had. It simply went beyond language and reason.
On my field trips I travelled to a spectacular and overwhelming place, I sought out a place where I could come into contact with the violent power of volcanism and the vast sea of liquid stone that flows around inside planet earth, where I could pretend to be an explorer to an alien world. Only to have the experience that so many have: that neither words nor pictures could convey the experience of actually being there. It became more and more apparent to me that rather than the landscape itself, it was this experience of failing to relay or convey that was the interesting subject matter in the project. In the final exhibition I wanted the viewers to get a chance to take part in such an experience, by staging an aesthetic situation that itself could be experienced as sublime, and then enhance this by having the visitors walk in alone, and denying them the possibility of taking photos with their phones inside the exhibition. If they wanted to confirm the experience with themselves by relaying it to others, they would have to rely on their own oral account, or the failed attempt to give one.
By doing so, I found that I could expand on the spatial dimension of absence in the photographic medium to make works that both employ the category of ‘photography’ on a wider set of expressions, including those that don't involve photographic images, but also to approach the complex topic of how sacrality can manifest in contemporary art. I perceive the sublime to be a sort of intermediary between experiences associated with on the one hand religion/spirituality and and on the other contemporary art, and in this chapter I attempt at unpacking their relation.
The sublime and land art
In the romantic period, the sublime was associated with landscape painting, and later re-emerged in the painter Barnett Newman´s essay The sublime is now. Today the romantic sublime has survived in Hollywood movies, and many of them are an inspiration for my project. Contact, quoted from in the beginning of this chapter being one of them. Teleportation draws on inspiration from several different traditions of visual art, amongst them the minimalist and land art movements in America in the 60s and 70s. This is because minimalism found a way for contemporary art to engage with the immediate phenomenological relation between the viewer, the artwork and the space of experience. Some of the minimalists, such as Robert Morris And Robert Smithson also began making land art. Land art in turn was one way for contemporary art to once again engage with ideas of the sublime and landscape, and the land artists brought forth very relevant dilemmas concerning absence and perceiving at a distance. One could say that the land art of the 60s and 70s introduced a bridge between modernism and the romantics, and brought back landscape as a topic within contemporary art. Producing works that were far away in inaccessible locations meant that most people would experience them either through documentation or description. Those who sought them out had the experience of not only the work, but also the journey there, often somewhat perilous and involving the experience of the often spectacular landscapes that the work was part of.
Describing the journey to see Michael Heizer´s work of land art, Double Negative in the Nevada Desert, Suzan Boettger writes:
The road is not maintained; in the hot dry weather conditions typical of a southwestern desert, the topsoil pulverises into fine sand, making ascent impossible except by a heavy four-wheel drive vehicle. Having bumped up onto the top of the mesa, one is confronted with a high, flat desert coerced by scattered low scrub brush. Double Negative´s cuts are not easy to find; they are below the mesa top level and several extensions project from its central mass. The few road markers are barely discernible; one attempts to note mileage as the museum's directions require, make the correct turns, and eventually creeps along the edge in the vehicle or explores the terrain on foot, looking down for those geometric, open-air tunnels in the sandy cliffs.
Here the journey toward the artwork becomes as much part of the experience itself as the actual work, if understood as the two cuts into the landscape that Michael Heizer produced. I understand this as an invitation from the artist for the viewer to take part in not only the reception of the work, but also in the production of the work. To themselves experience what it was like for the artist to approach the site of origin of the artwork, and in this way, be able to have a deeper and more involved participation in the creation of the artwork itself.
Most viewers would not seek out the actual works of land art however, they would encounter them at a distance through documentation. Usually by means of photography, drawings and film. This provided a radical discrepancy between the actuality of the work at the site of production and the aesthetic experience of the viewer.3 Robert Smithson explored this field of tension between outdoor sites and their representation in the gallery, through what he termed nonsites.
The nonsites were installations consisting of rocks, sand and other debris he had collected at distant sites, which was displayed in the gallery in aestheticizing containers with a visual language resembling minimalism. These were accompanied by photographs and maps of the locations, which were also in an aestheticized form.
By doing this, Smithson not only called attention to the absence of the site which was the focal point of the work, but also to the way representation itself builds its own reality and new aesthetic forms. Not least, the nonsites can be seen as pointing to how such (failed) attempts at re-creating the overwhelming vastness of the great outdoor spaces, the universe and of geologic time is itself the moment of the sublime:
Sublimity, then, refers to the moment when the ability to apprehend, to know, and to express a thought or sensation is defeated. Yet, through this very defeat, the mind gets a feeling for that which lies beyond thought and language.4
When looking at Smithson´s oævre, with his interest in entropy, ancient temples, events on a cosmic scale, geology and so on, it is apparent to me that he (and other land art artists) were trying to find a modern language for the sublime. This, along with how his nonsites in a playful, sometimes almost banal way, conjures up central issues concerning representation through image forms that also has a rational, utilitarian and sometimes scientific use (photography, maps, specimens), has led to Smithson being a central influence on the initial formulations of my project. Whereas I was more directly referencing Smithson´s nonsites in the early work, as the project progressed and I started to have more of my own material to build on, I detached from Smithson, and relied more on the internal dynamic between my own works themselves toward the final final part of the project.
Interestingly, I myself have never seen a work by Robert Smithson, even though I have based a large part of my initial project formulation on his nonsites. As such this not only introduces another level of distance in my relation to his work, but also illustrates how we live in a world in which photographic representation creates autonomous spheres of reality that can be related to. One can ask the question of whether my project would be different had I had the possibility to experience one of his works in real life.
Writing about Smithson´s seminal work Spiral Jetty, which consists of three parts: a land art work (the jetty in the Great Salt Lake), a text and a film, Gary Shapiro suggests that the work´s location becomes unclear. There is no inherent hierarchy between the site, the text and the film, and the work thus lacks a focal point and needs to be understood as hovering within a triangulation between the different elements.5 As such, my project can also be understood as not about the lava field, the photo objects or the exhibitions as such, but as a function of how these different elements work together to create a sense of absence or evasiveness.
Two forms of the sublime
Smithson´s works, and their dilemmas between perceiving at a distance and perceiving the here and now, can serve as a bridge toward a nuancing of the idea of the sublime, and its relation to the works in Teleportation. We can speak of two forms of the sublime: the romantic and the postmodern. The romantic sublime relates to a sense of awe resulting from a transcendent experience - an encounter with a situation that acualises a (often metaphysical) reality beyond the situation at hand, and the subsequent failure to convey the magnitude of it. The postmodern sublime is also a question of a failure to convey an experience, but one that relates not to transcendence, but to immanence.6 One is confronted with the utter senselessness of the being of things, the impossibility of answering the question of why something is. The spiritual in art emerges as we become aware of the dysfunctional, bare presence of objects around us.7
What happens when I try to apply these two versions of the sublime on Teleportation? In the initial phase of the project, I was concerned with the lava field and how the works pointed beyond themselves, as photographs do, back to their subject matter. But the loss of context that appeared as they were converted into sculptural objects in more and more detached situations, meant that the project progressively approached a more postmodern conception of the sublime. The isolation of the works in a detached situation, in which the viewer was immersed in the space with the photo objects qua tactile and physical objects as such, meant that the encounter to a larger degree took on the quality of a here-and-now8, and the postmodern version of the sublime might be more relevant.
There is also the question of how a work of art manifests the sublime. Is the artwork an illustration of a sublime experience, or the actual site and catalyst for a sublime experience on the part of the viewer?
Two pieces of work can be used to describe such a distinction. Friedrich´s painting Monk by the sea depicts a tiny human figure contemplating the grandeur of a maritime landscape. The monk figure is small compared to the landscape, and acts as a proxy for us, the viewers. I don't perceive the painting to provide me with an encounter with the sublime landscape as such, but with the idea of having an experience of the sublime when encountering such a landscape.
James Turrell's skyspaces on the other hand, can be seen as attempts at inserting the audience into an aestheticized situation in which they may experience the sort of contemplation of the vastness and infinity of nature that is suggested by proxy in Friedrich's painting. The sky spaces attempts at framing the direct experience of the sublime, by opening up a framed view to the natural sky. In addition to this, Turrell modulates the perception of the colour of the sky by gradually modifying the colour of the light inside the skyspace where the viewer is located. Thus, Turrell uses the act of perceiving the artwork itself as a way of encountering the sublime in a here and now situation. The viewing body is inserted into a context that allows the vast reach of vision itself to penetrate into the distance, while at the same time, impacting how vision is interpreted by the situated body, by manipulating the situation in which the eyes are located. As such, Turrell´s Skyspaces can be seen as sites of negotiation between the romantic and the postmodern notions of the sublime.
There-Now
Black holes are perhaps the strangest objects in the universe, and the ultimate horizon of physical reality. Being the result of stars that have collapsed under the force of gravity and squeezed into a singularity - an object with a microscopic volume and a monstrous mass, their gravity is so immense that they devour anything that comes near. In fact, inside black holes the laws of physics as we know them break down, and time literally stops. A black hole is like a vortex in the very fabric of space, they mark the boundary of (and perhaps points of departure from) reality as we know it.
Black holes are surrounded by what is called the event horizon. Beyond this point, nothing can return, not even light. It is sucked into the dark vortex of the black hole and lost for all eternity. This is why black holes are black.
For decades, scientists knew that black holes exist, they could not observe them, but could infer their existence from the gravity effects on objects surrounding them. They knew that there was something there, that reality was richer than what their senses could tell them at that point in time, but until further evidence, had to rely on belief. In 2019, for the first time, the research group “Event Horizon Telescope” managed to photograph a black hole, or more precisely, they managed to photograph the dust cloud surrounding the event horizon of the black hole at the centre of the galaxy M87. A stunning achievement, given that the black hole is 55 million light years away, and relatively small in size.
Like human explorers of all times who have travelled toward the horizon in curiosity, we can now observe the event horizon of the black hole, we can approach it, but we cannot peer over the edge and come back to tell about it. We can never look into the black hole itself, this remains a physical impossibility. And yet, that is where the answer to some of our deepest questions about reality lies, but the very laws of existence guarantees that what is inside will forever remain as hidden from direct view as the secret of what is beyond the horizon of death.
To find out what is beyond death, one will have to give up the possibility of coming back to tell about it. You have to plunge in, “step into the light” and let the truth of what happened rest with you alone for eternity.
As such, the sublime marks the limits of reason and expression together with a sense of what might lie beyond these limits; this may well explain its association with the transcendent, conceived by the theologian John Milbank ‘as the absolutely unknowable void, upon whose brink we finite beings must dizzily hover’ 9
What fascinates me about black holes is that they are localised in the same spacetime as us. They are to the best of our knowledge physical locations, and yet they hover between physics and metaphysics and blur the separation between the two. Black holes have a structure that can be explored by means of artistic research: A location, a site, immanent to the physical world with metaphysical properties, that is impossible to experience directly. It has to be approached by indirect means, but the forces within it and around it makes it impossible to bring back an objective observation of the actual inside. The black hole is what philosopher Timothy Morton would call a “hyperobject”10, it is an object of such extension in time and space, that it cannot be grasped in a single act of cognition. We have to piece together our conception of it from its disparate manifestations, often indirectly. The idea of applying this structure to my artistic work and exhibitions has grown to increasing prominence throughout the Teleportation project, and in the project epilogue, I am experimenting with further radicalising the idea of unrepresentability by eliminating photographic representation altogether.
If you were to observe an object approaching the event horizon of a black hole, it would appear to slow down and freeze for a while. This is due to the red shift (the light´s Doppler effect under the force of the black hole´s gravity). The swedish photographer and writer Cecilia Grönberg has used this effect at the event horizon in her Ph.d. reflection to stage the black hole as a form of camera or projector, in order to illustrate how digital photographs can be understood as images or projections with a different materiality than that of the analog photograph. They have a different form of localization, characterised as consisting of digital code translated from the physical world by digital interface, but still possible to regard as pictures, not merely information. However, their spatial and temporal dislocation online introduces a situation where what the images gain in distribution and accessibility, they lose in spatialised specificity. As Grönberg puts it they live on as unholy ghosts, in an undead existence, faintly observable at the event horizon.11
I am not so concerned with the distinction between analogue and digital photography as such, but Grönberg introduces an interesting way of understanding how photography´s insertion into the digital realm has altered its relation to spatiality.
Before the age of digital photography and camera phones, the absence of the subject matter manifested in still photographs involved a larger distance in time and was less immediate, since the image would have to be processed and viewed in print before reaching the viewer. In his article Hey, I´m here right now’: camera phone photographs and mediated presence, Mikko Villi describes how, with the advent of digital photography and its embedding into telephones and the internet, photography today carries less temporal absence (the past). Now we are sharing images of what is happening, “look at where I am, look at what I'm doing right now”.x This is in contrast to how photography usually has been described, exemplified by Roland Barthes’ statement that photography does not establish a sense of ‘being-there’, but of ‘having-been-there’.12
In his article Villi describes how, based on qualitative research, he has found that photography is increasingly perceived as an instantaneous experience, there-now, and thus vernacular photography has moved closer to a form of ‘teleportation’, if understood as travel without time delay or movement. This is because the balance between the two main forms of absence that photographs can be said to manifest (the spatial “there” and the temporal “then”) has shifted toward the spatial dimension, increasing the potential relevance and need for this to be examined through artistic research.
One could say that in a world saturated with pictures, the subject for photography has become photography itself, as described by for example Wilem Flusser, Susan Sontag and Robert Shore. Photographic representations create a new realm of reality that itself is being reproduced in photographs. This is what is often termed a post-photographic condition. Granted, my project is a research aimed at structural properties of photography, I was however not interested in directly using or examining the vernacular forms that photographs take on in camera phones, on the internet and social media. That is not to say that I did not want my project to be able to function as a commentary upon such forms of photography, but as described earlier, I have been more interested in how the structure of presence and absence in photography works on a more fundamental phenomenological and symbolic level, and how it can be used to approach notions of immersion, absence, sacrality and the sublime within contemporary art. By bypassing and “hacking” a process within the camera technology meant to produce a seamless photographic representation (the infinitely sharp image obtained through focus stacking), I am insisting on the immediacy of the physical object and the here and now presence of the touching body in a digital world. This way my intervention in the technical process can be seen as staging in a very literal way the dilemma of presence and absence contained within the photographic image, and of which the difference between analogue and digital photographs is but a small tip of a much larger iceberg.
This dilemma can be seen in relation to notions of a postmodern sublime. As a result of secularism and media awareness, we seem less inclined to view the breakdown of expression associated with the sublime as indicators of the transcendent or spiritual realms. In a postmodern context the sublime could rather emerge as a confirmation of immanence, and transcendence appears as a mere illusion brought about by a misconception of reality. Slavoj Zizek suggests that in art, the material and the spiritual are intertwined, and that the spiritual emerges when we become aware of the material inertia, the dysfunctional bare presence of objects around us. We are confronted with the meaninglessness of the material world, a detachment of context where all that we know and understand is rendered useless. In this precise moment, we are confronted with a similar instance within representation that nonetheless exceeds the possibility of representation.13
Such a view may align with Lyotard´s contention that the sublime happens in the here and now, not in the over there. When discussing Barnett Newman´s use of the term, and his rejection of romantic notions of the sublime, Lyotard stresses that Newman doesn´t reject the fundamental task of romantic art, that of bearing witness to the inexpressible. But Newman rejects the romantic claim that the sublime is related to something ‘over there’, in favour of the here and now; the mystery consisting of ‘something happening’ in itself. In Newman´s case, the indeterminate ‘it’ which happens is the paint, the picture.
Here and now, there is this painting, and that’s what is sublime.14
This may be applied to the photo objects in my project, and the way that they detached from their initial photographic indexicality, and took on an objecthood located in the here and now of the physical space shared with the viewer.15 If the romantic sense of the sublime appears in the project, it would be in the process of their making, by the way that I have encountered the lava field, and have been thinking about and staged a recreation of my journey for the viewer, particularly in Teleportation #2 and #3. The installations facilitate a strong presence in the here and now, but they are the result of my experiences travelling to, remembering, and trying to re-create my experience of the original location of the lava field.
I can visit the lava field, ‘cross over the horizon’ so to speak, and bring back traces, but at some point the horizon becomes an event horizon, parts of what was there, what I experienced with my senses and my being can never be reproduced, it can never escape, and my accounts of it will never be a substitute for the experience of having been there.
The Teleportation project reflects a frustration over this situation of having a technology that can seem to promise an accurate reproduction (high end digital camera technologies), but fails to deliver on it in terms of reproducing my experience of being on site. These basic, fundamental properties of photographic representation carry a structure that can be applied to other areas of existence and experience. They can teach us something about how we live with and through virtual phenomena such as memory, anticipation, imagination, illusion, all the while being immersed in the physical reality of the here and now.
The solution to my conundrum turned out to be the making of an artwork which in itself could manifest a sublime experience. What had started out as a romantic sublime, an attempt at making works that point beyond themselves, had now turned into works that referred back to themselves and their immediate inscription in the here and now shared with the viewer -the postmodern sublime described by Zizek and Lyotard: Art does not imitate nature, it creates a world apart.16
Sacrality
Tino Seghal has said that ‘art is the refuge of the spiritual in a secular society’. In order for secular society to be secular it has had to purge itself of spirituality, by relegating it to the secluded sphere of religion. Museums and art become the place where secular society, in a secular way, can relate itself to higher spheres, without returning to religion.17 In such a view, the sublime can be understood as an intermediary between secularism and the realm of the spiritual, in order for a rational and commodified world to retain possibilities for existential speculation and wonder.
I was interested to see if it was possible to make work that directly addresses and instantiates the types of experience and reflection associated with spiritual practice. I wanted to make an attempt at re-mystifying the experience of the photograph, a medium which to such a degree has become commodified in postmodern society. I wanted to experiment with using its qualities of absence to not only serve as an occasion for a humanist notion such as the sublime, but also to manifest experiences of sacrality, or perhaps more precisely, the numinous.
‘The numinous’ is a term coined by the philosopher Rudolf Otto in order to denote the subjective experience that underlies all religion. The term has three components: mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Mysterium means that the numinous is ‘wholly other’, it is entirely different from what we experience in ordinary life, and it evokes a reaction of silence. This mysterium is tremendum, it appears overwhelming and provokes fear. The numinous is also fascinans - it presents itself as merciful and gracious. Otto contended that in order to fully appreciate the meaning of the numinous, one will have to actually experience it, as it is a direct non-discursive phenomenon. Perhaps the biggest criticism of Otto´s term is it´s sui generis nature, that it is irreducible to historical or social origins. I am not so concerned with whether our experience of the numinous has its origins in social tradition and learning, or eternal truth. My main interest is with the mere existence of such a category of experience, and how it can be initiated in a contemporary work of art.
I have tried to underscore numinous qualities in the exhibitions by quite literally making religious references: in exhibition #1 by using elements from a zen rock garden and by having visitors remove their shoes (as is custom in zen temples and mosques), as well as the layout of the works on the floor. In exhibition #2 I used the design of the light in the ceiling to hint toward church architecture and the way light enters from above. In the third exhibition I wanted a space that created strong reverb and thus referencing (among other things) cathedrals, as well as a narrow corridor leading inspired by tombs and crypts.
In addition to these fairly obvious references, one could also interpret the project´s general focus on absence as a numinous quality in itself. In eastern thought, such as Buddhism and Taoism for example, it is common to use negative definitions, saying what something is not, in order to approach or denote what lies beyond physical reality - non-being. This is due to its nature of nothingness, we simply cannot know what it is. If we did,it would cease to be nothing and become something.
Phillip Shaw highlights a similar centrality of absence when discussing Lacan's notion of the sublime:
As void, lack, or absence, the Lacanian sublime functions as a negative image of the Kantian a priori : a regulative idea which must be posited but that cannot be empirically known. God, in the Lacanian schema, remains, therefore, an impossible object of desire: the more God is approached the more he recedes.18
By having both the subject matter (the lava rocks), and the project design itself (artistic works that increasingly remove themselves from the initial referent) manifest such a receding quality - by detaching from its context, becoming unidentifiable and hiding in the dark, I wanted to see if the ‘frame’ for the photographic objects, the project design itself, could facilitate a transformation of the photographic content, and thus, approach the sort of re-mystification that I was looking for. Perhaps this would also allow for working with photography in a way that is not dependent on cameras, images or even vision, and in this way elucidate the more everyday manifestations of the medium that saturates our lives.
References
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1985. «The sublime and the Avant Garde» Paragraph 6: 1-18.
Lippard, Lucy R.. 2014. Undermining: a wild ride through land use, politics, and art in the changing west. New York: The New Press.
Shaw, Philip. 2017. The Sublime. London: Routledge. ECSCOhost ebooks.
Shapiro, Gary. 1995. Earthwards: Robert Smithson and art after Babel. Berkley: University of California Press.
Grönberg, Cecilia. 2016. Händelseshorisont // Event horizon: Distribuerad fotografi. Göteborg: OEI books.
Villi, Mikko. 2015. «Hey, I’m Here Right Now: Camera Phone Photographs and Mediated Presence.» Photographies 8(1).
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1985. «The sublime and the Avant Garde» Paragraph 6: 1-18.
The Art Newspaper. 2021. «A brush with…Tino Sehgal.» 04.08.2021. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/08/04/a-brush-with-tino-sehgal
Yarrow, Ralph. 2007. Sacred theatre. England: Intellect books.
Britannica. «Immanence:philosophy and theology» 04.05.2022. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chinese-philosophy