Nici Jost: From West to East to Space / Artstübli, Basel / Interview
Nici Jost’s artistic focus revolves around the color pink, delving into its characteristics, history, and multifaceted roles in psychology, art, literature, and politics. Her work not only explores pink as a controversial element but also as a socio-political lens that provokes discourse. Curated by Isabel Balzer, the exhibition “From West to East to Space” showcases Jost’s exploration of cultural identity and social space through pink. It spans her development from critiquing Western ideals to engaging with Chinese culture and culminates in the GJ 504b project, delving into the intersection of art, science, and technology. Through workshops, talks, and screenings, Jost invites viewers to contemplate the complex significance of pink beyond conventional perceptions. In this video, the artist guides you through her exhibition.
Nici Jost: From West to East to Space. Solo exhibition at Artstübli, Basel. Basel (Switzerland), April 28, 2024.
Nici Jost: From West to East to Space. Solo exhibition at Artstübli, Basel. Basel (Switzerland), April 28, 2024.
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CreativityTranscript
00:00So, here at the Archdubly, I'm showing a summary of my work from the past 15 years.
00:23I've been researching the color pink.
00:26I guess first it was a personal obsession, and at one point I decided to investigate
00:33the color a bit more in depth, socially, politically.
00:41It's a very polarizing color, which I realized during my studies.
00:46And here in this exhibition, you can see three parts of my work.
00:51The first part is probably the first 10 years, researching the color in the Western culture,
00:58how it impacts humans, society, the way we navigate.
01:03I'm standing in front of a work called Recycling Art, Pretty in Pink.
01:07I've used a specific pink shade from my pink color system.
01:14The pink color system is the result of my research by analyzing my collection, a couple
01:22thousand objects, which I sorted by color tone, and actually found out that there was
01:29some kind of system behind the color pink, and the way which products are used, or which
01:35products have which pink tone.
01:39This one you can see right here, this is the refined light pink from my system.
01:44It's mainly used on consummation products, like sugar, sweets, beauty products, and also
01:52labels like Lego or Barbie use this specific pink tone for their products.
01:59It also animates people to buy things twice, maybe like the Legos, you have these beautiful
02:05colors, and then they also put a pink line on the market, so if you have a girl you have
02:12to buy extra Legos, or the bobby car, which exists in red, it's like the Barbie car, but
02:20if you have a girl later on, then you have to buy another one in pink, or the other way
02:25around, you have a boy afterwards, and he wouldn't want to use the pink bobby car.
02:31This work has this refined light pink shade, and those are artworks which I recycled.
02:37I went to visit artists in their studio and asked them if they had artworks standing around
02:45which they don't use anymore, they don't want to re-show again, or just doesn't match their
02:52portfolio anymore, and they gave me their artworks in exchange of a recycling ticket,
03:02and they gave me the rights of their artwork, and had the permission to re-show their work
03:10under the circumstances that I would cover them in pink.
03:14There's artworks from very famous artists, and former art students I used to study with.
03:26The system I used afterwards to do the pricing was the volume of the work, so each artwork
03:32has the same value on the market now, it doesn't matter which artist actually, where it comes
03:39from.
03:40Here are just a few of them, down here you can see work where I used another pink shade
03:49from my colour system, it's the cell pink.
03:53I remodelled this pink shade after the Baker Miller pink, which was created in the US,
04:00I think in the 70s from the military.
04:03It has a supposedly calming effect on humans, when you enter a room in this colour, your
04:12pulse should go down very fast.
04:16So the pink colour system I use as a sort of reference model to navigate through my
04:25work.
04:26After about 10 years researching the colour pink in Western culture, being in Switzerland,
04:33trying to look around the world, how this colour is perceived maybe differently in different
04:39cultures, I found out that it was very difficult to get to know more in Asian, to get to know
04:48more especially about China, on this colour, through the internet.
04:54Since most of my objects in my collection are labelled with Made in China, I thought
04:58it was a very interesting country to go visit and try to find out a bit more about the colour
05:06and how it's perceived in the Chinese culture.
05:09I was lucky enough that I was allowed to go with the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, or I was
05:14allowed to visit the Swatch Art Peace Hotel as an artist in residence for six months in
05:202018, where I, I guess the first three months I got there I was a bit overwhelmed and I
05:30used the colour pink as a tool or as a navigation through the city.
05:36So I went out and collected everything I could find or see on the colour pink.
05:45This one, the vitrine you can see here, those are objects which I found or got, bought,
05:55I brought home from China after six months in five suitcases and some packaging where
06:00you can already see a sort of difference in the way the colour is used.
06:10Here you probably wouldn't find any meat products or especially salty products in this colour
06:19because I guess we're used to having sweets packaged like that.
06:26I took about probably like 3,000 photographs and when I got back from China I started to
06:34sort them out and what did I do?
06:38I really, I did, without any concept, I went through the city and just photographed what
06:43I found, what was pink, and I was able to divide my photographs, videos, audio into
06:53different categories and the images you can see in the back are just a small extract out
07:01of the work.
07:02Those are images of the huge, how do you say, construction sites where they put billboards.
07:12After coming back from China I was able to add two more pink shades to my pink colour
07:17system, the silent pink and the peach pink, and they're based on the research I've done
07:24in China on Chinese language, on how you describe the colour pink, and I realised that there
07:33was a difference to Western culture or to our language and even if you look at the English
07:39language and the German language, if you talk about pink you would talk probably of a different
07:47pink shade.
07:49This would probably be more described as a rosé, in German, in English it's pink, and
07:55in China it varies a bit more.
08:00For example, there is not a single character to describe the colour, they always put two
08:04characters together which is very common, but there is no character standing on its
08:12own that describes the colour.
08:15So it's red powder or peach red which describes the colour pink.
08:22I found this very bright pink pot of colour and it was described as peach pink, translated
08:30into English, and for me a peach pink colour is a very, very light colour and in the Chinese
08:37the peach pink was a very bright, almost neon colour.
08:41So that's where the silent pink and the peach pink come from.
08:47And after 2018 I got back, I was allowed to exhibit my works in 2021 in Kunstraum Baden,
08:55and yeah, what's next?
09:00I guess the colour pink navigates my work through my life and on social media Ben Moore
09:08contacted me, he's an astrophysicist at the University in Zurich, and he sent me this
09:14image of a nebula, the Orion Nebula, which he photographed from Davos and said, hey,
09:21did you know pink exists in the universe?
09:25And at the same time, in the same timeline, Nadine Friedl, a friend of mine, she's an
09:31expert or a technology enthusiast, asked me if I would want to do some work together with
09:37her and she loves the colour pink and also her website is full of female astronauts.
09:48So I thought somehow this works together and we started to create this new body of work
09:57about the colour pink in the universe.
10:01It started with this image from Ben Moore.
10:04It's not hanging in this exhibition.
10:06It's an original image from the Orion Nebula.
10:11You can see it over here, but this is the artificial intelligence version of this nebula.
10:21So the colour pink exists in these gas clouds in the universe.
10:28And after a while Ben came up, hey, did you know there's actually a pink planet 57 light
10:34years from us?
10:37It's called GJ 504B.
10:41And Nadine and I, we were very excited.
10:43We started to use artificial intelligence to recreate this planet and the way maybe
10:52life would look like on a planet like that.
10:55After a while Ben's like, but you knew it was a gas planet.
11:00We had to, yeah, it was fun playing around with these pink landscapes, but yeah, so we
11:11started to do research on how would life look like on a gas planet, a pink gas planet.
11:19And we asked JetGPT, what features does a species need to survive on a gas planet?
11:32And it came up with a couple of different species, which actually exist on earth.
11:38So we recreated them with AI and then took the background away in Photoshop and put them
11:50back into an AI tool, Midjourney, and blended them together.
11:56So what you see here are potential species which could survive on a, or which potentially
12:02live on a gas planet like the GJ 504B.
12:07Yeah, because they're species from earth merged together, which have all components that actually
12:13could survive on this planet.
12:16The works over here, you can see those two images are an experiment on how the atmosphere
12:23of the planet could look like.
12:25It's similar to Jupiter and there's a lot of research already existing on the internet
12:31or through NASA.
12:32So we tried to recreate it through AI, how it could look like.
12:38And the interesting thing is because AI only knows what we already know and it's very hard
12:43to create new things that don't exist.
12:47For example, the lightnings, they always went from top to bottom.
12:54And on a planet like GJ 504B, where gravity plays a different role, or there is no gravity,
13:01I think, the lightning would not go from top to bottom, they would go everywhere.
13:06And every time I put it back into this AI tool, it would correct me and put it from
13:11top to down.
13:12I would change it in Photoshop again, put it back in and it would go from top to bottom
13:16again.
13:17So we really, it was interesting to work with AI on this project and figuring out the limits
13:29where it can go.
13:31This is Mika.
13:33It's an embodiment of AI for this project.
13:38And Mika tells us about how the color pink, or why the color pink exists in space.
13:48And the text she actually is, you can hear here, the story she's telling, is from Ben
13:55Moore, originally.
13:59And because it was very, very in-depth and very scientific, and it was hard to listen
14:05to for a longer time, we told JATCPT how to do the storytelling and made a story out of
14:15it.
14:16So this whole project is in collaboration with artificial intelligence, it's like a
14:22ping-pong back and forth between Nadine and me, and then back to Ben, is it really possible?
14:31He was like our scientific eye over this whole thing.
14:34It's a planet in the 59 Virginies, a sun-like star.
14:39The universe is replete with exoplanets showcasing colors, ranging from deep dark blue and vibrant
14:45green to muted brown.
14:48But GJ504b breaks the mold with its signature pink hue, a captivating color likely resulting
14:55from the powerful ultraviolet radiation of its host star, interacting with the hydrogen
15:01gas in its atmosphere.
15:03Combined with the planet's intrinsic heat, a warm 270 degrees centigrade retained from
15:09its birth 160 million years ago, GJ504b radiates with its iconic dull magenta glow.