According to Navid Nuur, public space is pre-eminently the domain of people and movement. Especially if that space is situated in the centre of a large city, such as The Hague. People are present there day and night. There is hardly any silence, sound and movement swell, reverberate, and fade away, after which the cycle starts all over again.

Nuur - educated at the Utrecht School of the Arts (Utrecht) and the Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam) and living and working in The Hague - wanted his sculpture RE/FLECT/OR (2018) would somehow incorporate those day and night movements.

The sculpture consists of an external architectural skeleton with coloured reflectors on the inside. These reflectors ensure that the inside sometimes changes colour and lights up due to the reflection of light rays. Especially when it is dark, the illumination of shop windows, the glow of headlights or the flash of mobile phones provide a wonderful colour experience.

In this way, the artist, who in 2010 won the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunstprijs, an art prize for young talent in the visual arts, not only reflects on urban dynamics, but also makes it clear that art on the street literally reflects the life around the sculpture. He has made a sculpture that lights up by artificial light, and that actually shows the afterimage of urban dynamics, or the residue of human presence.

Meanwhile, the RE/FLECT/OR refers in its form to the encroaching high-rise buildings in this part of The Hague city centre, where the process of urban transformation is increasingly taking place at a higher level due to a lack of space. Whether you will soon be able to see the street from great heights, and thus also the life or a reflection thereof, remains to be seen, of course.

Text: Lennard Dost