The exhibition presents Conner’s experimental films with a representative selection of nine works. Among these is CROSSROAD (1976), a film that assembles footage of the first U.S. underwater atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946 into a 36-minute study on the horror and sublimity of this apocalyptic event.

Light out of Darkness references a solo exhibition project of the same name for the University Art Museum at Berkeley, California, in the 1980s. One of the main reasons it never took place was Conner’s refusal to compromise in his dealings with institutions, whose rules for artists he would not accept. The title Light out of Darkness emphasizes the experimental character of Conner’s filmic output, which in his early works, especially, resembles a brilliant probing of our perceptual possibilities. The symbolic dualism of light and darkness stands for the artist’s propensity to think in opposites and metaphors and for his mysticism.

This exhibition has been realized in cooperation with Museum Tinguely, Basel.