HAMBURG.- To mark the opening of IBA Hamburg’s presentation year, British artist Anthony McCall realized a light project for Hamburg Deichtorhallen, which began on 22 March 2013. The project reimagines the »Leap across the Elbe« in visual terms. Three searchlights project slender beams of white light towards one another from three different locations - from the roof of the SPIEGEL building next to Deichtorhallen in Hamburg Neustadt, from the bunker in Wilhelmsburg, and from the Deichtorhallen - Falckenberg Collection in Hamburg-Harburg, thus linking the Elbe island with both the north and the south banks of the river. Over the year, these three horizontal beams of light will progressively rotate their angles of direction so that, one by one, all sections of the city will become part of this symbolic leap.

Starting ninety minutes after sunset, »Crossing the Elbe« is visible for 10-minutes every evening for a whole year in most parts of the sky between Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Deichtorhallen - Falckenburg Collection in Harburg.

The project is a collaboration between Deichtorhallen Hamburg and IBA. It was realized by Tim Hupe Architects.

Since the early 1970s Anthony McCall has been working with projected light. His »solid-light« installations occupy a space between line-drawing, cinema, and sculpture: fundamentally graphic, they are realized through the mediums of film or digital projection and the effect created is that of large-scale, three-dimensional sculptures composed of shifting membranes of light. Viewing becomes an active process of moving around and through the projected object, exploring it from different points of view. To the extent that viewers are incorporated into the forms and thus become part of what is seen, McCall’s light installations also suggest a relationship to performance. ANTHONY McCall’s work has been widely exhibited: at Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum fur Gegenwart - Berlin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, amongst many others.