carlier | gebauer, Berlin, is pleased to announce Nicole Miller’s solo exhibition For Turiya, opening on Friday, 2 May 2025, 6 – 9 pm, on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin.

Miller’s practice is rooted in film making and writing out of which she expands it into the array of laser light installation and sculptural work. The idea of transmutation is central to Miller’s work, which especially becomes emblematic by the means of laser light. The laser itself, as an analogue medium, is constituted by a transformation of audio waves into light waves, enabling a synesthetic experience: one hears light, sees sound. An immersive sensory sensation, it can hardly just be passively absorbed, thus Miller draws our attention on how we habitually metabolize imagery.

In this exhibition Nicole Miller presents her newest commission, the eponymously titled single channel laser light installation For Turiya. Dedicated to virtuous jazz musician and sonic healer, Alice Coltrane, known among her family and spiritual community as Turiyasangitananda or Turiya for short, this work poses as a continuation of Miller’s interest in the notion of Black excellence and stardom, while also fundamentally raising the questions of what it means to create and exist as an artist.

A bright, “effulgent” light beam cuts through the darkness, creating ever changing shapes which morph into textual fragments. Like with every act of artistic creation or even creation in general, something comes into being out of nothing. And yet beyond its arcane magic and mystery, the act of artistic expression and art making is a profoundly human experience, which can be traced as far back as the ancient wall marks and paintings prehistoric caves across the globe. Alice Coltrane or Turiya, dedicated her life to music as well as to her community by founding an ashram near Los Angeles. As an artist, musician, spiritual healer she becomes herself a vessel for communication, transmuting experiences, becoming “a body made of words”. This phrase, as it appears in the work, stems from Miller’s encounter with Alice Coltrane’s personal archive, which she was able to access in her research for the work. Miller dived into the musicians vedic chart, coming up with the words written by the laser through the astrology of Coltrane’s chart. These references have flown into the work, but are intentionally kept oblique out of respect to Coltrane, while further shedding light on her engagement with the realm of spiritual. Miller’s work itself is a profound experience, dwelling on the magic of art and language, but also transforming us as we witness it.

In relation to For Turiya, the gallery showcases Miller’s sculpture Michael in Black from 2018. Producing molds from a cast which was taken directly from Michael Jacksons body around 1986, Miller created an uncanny, life-sized bronze figure. In a kneeling position, the figure is uncomfortably and precisely perched on the edge of the plinth, but also on the threshold of the moment, where people become ideas, rendered almost solely to icons. In 2022, Miller released a publication titled “Michael in Black”, which she dedicated to the work but also consist of contributions from artists, theorists and collaborators. Both works, Michael in Black and For Turiya emerged from special moments of encounters – the cast in an auction and Alice Coltrane’s  family archive – which Miller then herself transformed into works of art.