Liminal Lens: experiences of non-institutional photography praxis at the Photo Art Fair in Budapest
“A dream that was thought to be already over” presents a curated selection of photographic images, photographic objects, archival images, recaptured and repurposed text, with the idea to explore the field and fabric of photography and disconnectedness of contemporary ‘real’ by casting a glance at the the phenomena of leisure, conduits of friendship, inexplicable connections and the humanistic dream of the twentieth century.
Déjà rêvé, meaning “already dreamed”, describes a sensation when we feel that we are revisiting a dream we already had. Strong emotions that inexplicably hold us, a sense of foreboding or gentleness, of closeness with the dreamscape even in the awake state. Choosing the longhand of that expression as its title, 'A dream that we thought was already over' is a subtle assembly of authors whose work reflects the feeling of atemporal beauty of singular moments lost in time, often passing unnoticed or captured in seclusion. Images of places visited on travels that whip by; light reflected on a pot of late summer flowers noticed mid-conversation; familiar faces lost in solitude; imaginary spaces that somehow feel a part of one’s memory. These tree artists - Mia Ćuk, Srdjan Veljović and Maria Ćalić - extends our stay in those spaces, reminding us to revisit our past dreams and values.
Working with a combination of photography, collage, resin and other materials, Maria Ćalić creates liminal symbolic spaces that probe the ghostly apparition of material world. Her glacially mysterious ’Neurorezervoar’ (neuroreservoir) follows her idea of ‘encapsulating the shapes of material world’, as she encases subtle photographic films in multiple layers of semi-transparent resin, playing with the vulnerable nature of photography-as-other.
Mia Ćuk usess stillness for re-setting and re-orienting the viewer towards the poetry of the everyday. Her work can be read as “almost photographic”, using the medium of photography to see the overlooked, rather than to document the apparent and visible. Her recent interest lays in the materiality of “the photographic”, and in gestures of erasure and disappearance of images, rather than their creation.
Conceptual documentarist Srdjan Veljović, better known for his urban images of the 90s, delves in the intimate space of friendship and leisure. His series “Optional reflections in time” engage with the personal space, resonant images of summers past, saturated and not faded by time. All three artists thread lightly on the fissures of memory, experiment with space and taste of the old film stills, personal and found archives, interventions inside and around the photographic frame.
