Beam of Underground Sun , 2012

Arezoo Talebzadeh - Toronto, Canada
Kaveh Ashourinia - Toronto, Canada

Light Installation

Exploring visible and invisible urban elements, Beam of Underground Sun points to what we don’t see – subterranean experiences created by city infrastructure. Modernity has focused on city streets, on refining the urban environment and its surfaces. The ongoing construction and reconstruction of urban space through the work of architects and city planners has been paralleled beneath the pavement, producing another terrain – one of storage structures, passageways, and tunnels below-grade that negotiate the city’s geological history and former rivers and streams. 

The infrastructure of the city magnifies the gap created between the two cities, the above-ground and the underground. Using existing air shafts on sidewalks and walkways – a direct conduit between these two worlds – Talebzadeh and Ashourinia insert a poignant gesture into the urban landscape. Luminous shafts of light will connect these two cities – beams of light that draw the underground city that breathes beneath Toronto into daily life for one night.

Arezoo Talebzadeh is an architect and interior designer interested in the relationship between visible and invisible urban elements. Kaveh Ashourinia is a graphic designer whose work consistently returns to the intersection of human experience and the environment.

114

121 King Street West

This project is outdoors.