soul flashes is a programme of artist films presented in the IKOB black box over the course of 2026. The programme is divided into four cycles, each corresponding to one of the classical elements: water, air, fire, and earth.
The ancient concept of four simple substances – the liquid, the gaseous, the incandescently consuming and the solid – to explain the nature and complexity of all matter has been deeply influential across cultures and ages. Though modern science now classifies chemical compounds according to atomic theory, the symbolic power of the classical elements and their appearance in our everyday lives continue to resonate. soul flashes also attributes each element to a season: water for winter, air for spring, fire for summer and earth for autumn emphasizing the narrative and bodily qualities of each element.
Through the lens of these filmmakers, viewers experience different facets of human interaction with the forces of nature: attempts to control and exploit, to compound and embrace. Throughout cinematic history, the act of filming and the consumption of moving image has been riddled with fantasies and realities of power. With works spanning a period from 1928 to the present day, the programme shows the violence, beauty and comedy of our relationship to landscape and other living creatures.
In the films presented, elements can become characters unto themselves. soul flashes thereby proposes an underlying current of existence that escapes documentation and rational understanding, an expanded form of consciousness where we acknowledge a constant exchange with surrounding matter and energy. Viewers are invited to the depths of the ocean, to fly naked into the sky, drink from an oasis, or crack though the ice. When we are lucky, the soul flashes through.
31.03—07.06.2026
➷ 2nd cycle: air ➷
Laure Prouvost, Every Sunday Grand Ma, 2022. HD video, 7’17.
Courtesy of Laure Prouvost and LUX
Grandma grows a pair of wings and transforms into a human bird. She steps out of the darkness of a tunnel into a desolate misty landscape. She is above clouds, floating into where birds soar, above ground as bodies in levitation. The video tickles our senses and emotions towards loosing sense of gravity.
Graham Stevens, Desert Cloud, 1974. 16 mm, colour, sound. 17’34.
Courtesy of Graham Stevens
The English artist Graham Stevens uses air as an artistic medium and is interested in the utopian possibilities of bringing together art and science. Early experiments with balloons that he filled with air, water or sand led him to the Desert Cloud project: an immense silver cushion that floats like a shimmering kite, creating a patch of shadow in the middle of the desert. It is a free-floating structure that requires no fossil energy source and is capable of condensing and capturing water to create ice under a clear desert night sky. The experiment was filmed in 1974 in the Kuwaiti desert during the oil crisis, with the artist using a documentary format to explain his approach.
Viswanadhan, Air/Vayu, 1994. 16mm, colour, sound, extract of minutes 27:19 - 47:34 (full length: 60’38).
Film collection of the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou/Centre de création industrielle.
Viswanadhan was born in 1940 in a village of community artists in southern India, in an environment where daily life – and artmaking – were deeply imbued with spirituality. He went to art school in Chennai, where he was influenced by Western avant-garde art. He later settled in Paris and continued to develop his drawing and painting practice. Between 1976 and 2002, Viswanadhan made a series of five films devoted to the five elements of Indian cosmology (Sand, Water, Fire, Air, Ether) ‘in the same way that an artist paints’, as he said, with neither a script nor a screenplay. The emphasis is on movement and gesture, rather than meaning, as the camera moves from one vignette to another like a bird in flight.
Luís Lázaro Matos, Super Gibraltar II, 2015. video, sound 10’34.
Courtesy of the artist and Consonni Radzsizewski, Lisbon, Milan, Warsaw.
Luís Lázaro Matos's interest in Gibraltar comes through a text by Portuguese author Ferreira de Castro published in A volta do Mundo [Around the World] magazine in 1942. The author eloquently explains the existence of a belief in Gibraltar claiming that while the Barbary macaque (known as Gibraltar monkey in Portuguese) inhabits the Rock, the territory will remain under British rule. The Barbary macaque (Macaca sylvanus) is an Old World monkey that currently inhabits some areas of the Atlas Mountains in northern Africa and the Rock of Gibraltar in the south of the Iberian Peninsula. It is the only population of wild monkeys in Europe.
The films are screened consecutively and looped continuously during opening hours.
The first cycle, water, ran from 27.01-29.03.2026 and included the following films (more information here):
Jean Painlevé, Les Oursins, 1928. 35 mm, s/w, no sound, 10'
Alice Dos Reis, Mood Keep, 2018. HD film, 15’
Roman Signer, Einbruch in Eis, 1985. video, 1’7.
Eva Claus, To Be A Day, 2025. 16mm, 4:3, color, sound, 8’
The third cycle of films, fire, will begin on 21st June 2026.