From May 12 to August 21, 2016, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting the installation The Schirn Ring, the most ambitious and architectural installation of American artist Peter Halley (1953) to date, curated by its director Max Hollein. A very yellow and incredible sensorial explosion of light and energy in the Museum’s rotunda, through transmissions and reflections, filtered by translucency and bounced by metallic yellow prints of explosions, is echoing with wit, so characteristic to the artist, the not so distant particle accelerator CERN (phonetic pun: schirn-cern) and its circular geometries. "An installation that could hardly be any larger, more detailed, or more expansive, yet circling back to the original core of the artist’s creative power” (Hollein).

Technology and destruction. The Hindu God Shiva, located at the Museum's entrance as a sculpture, is appropriated here and transformed into a meaningful symbolic element and parable for the process of creation, through light (sky-lighted rotunda) and darkness (perimetral black-lighten corridors revealing the deity in a Universe of his characteristic prisons). Shiva is the darkness, because that is the only thing that pervades, unlike light, which is not eternal. Before and after light there is always darkness. So even though celebrating light at its fullest in this pantheon-like architecture, the artist is reminding us, as he always is, and referencing, the darkest sides of our technological society, the nature of that explosive almost nuclear light, and the cycles of life and death, thus the passage of time.

Shiva is the destroyer, by necessity, since all that has a beginning must have an end, but the powers of Lord Shiva are purifying powers. Destruction opens the path for a new creation of the Universe and regeneration through change; as this radiant circular Stargate might mark a new cycle for Halley, who is proving us, once again, to be on top of his game, perfecting and evolving every day with a renewed intensity and precision this infinite world of his own he has created, mirroring and making us reflect on the outside world we live in. The apocalypse might just be a rebirth after all …