Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova +MSUM, Ljubljana
8 December 2023 – 5 May 2024
Exhibition opening: Friday, 8. December 2023 at 7 p.m.
Curators: Ana Mizerit, Michal Novotný
Aleksandra Vajd’s survey exhibition From Within, Down and Above presents more than twenty years of work of the internationally recognized Prague-based Slovenian artist, one of the most prominent creators in the field of contemporary photography. The exhibition focuses on the medium itself from the perspective of its evolution and change through time, more specifically from the mid-1990s until today. In addition to outlining how the medium has changed since Vajd started using it, as well as her approach to the uses of the medium, the exhibition also underscores her practice of going back to its first moments of becoming, its ontological event, and today’s archeology of it. This approach allows the artist to focus on the key components of the medium, the remains and the essence of the matter preserving the potential to transform into and generate something new, as indicated by the title of the exhibition.
An additional character of Vajd's work is given through occasional expansions into a collaborative dialogue with artists who primarily use other artistic media that push the medium of photography beyond its borders, and establish new hybrid or fused artefacts. Through joint projects and dialogue as the method of artistic practice, the exhibition thus presents Hynek Alt, Jimena Mendoza, and Anetta Mona Chişa, the last of whom also provided the design context of the show. Finally, the exhibition shows the artist’s deep involvement in teaching, changing a part of the exhibition space into an inclusive and connective element, designed in anticipation of new, additional content to set the space in motion.
From Within, Down and Above begins with a series of conceptual photographs of the artist’s father, taken around the time of, and because of, his passing. The display derives from the show Vajd had at Moderna galerija’s project space Mala galerija in 2004.
The artist continued to entwine her creative practice and her private life, based on a critical exploration of her relationships with her family members and others, and her commitment to existential issues, when she began to collaborate with the Czech visual artist and her romantic partner Hynek Alt. Their joint series of portraits, Man Woman Unfinished, originates from their mutual observation and the exploration of their intimate relationship, further addressing issues of recreating memories and drawing a line between the present and past by juxtaposing the images in ever new combinations.
Later on, their dialogue and process of work came to be underpinned by a departure from classical photography in both content and form. Their common practice focused on reflections about the competences and limitations of the medium of photography and the polemics concerning perception, optical illusions and simulation, authorship, uniqueness and appropriation, stereotypes, social and gender identities, and photographs as three-dimensional objects in space. After their collaboration came to an end, Vajd carried on exploring the medium in terms of its objecthood, pushing its boundaries especially with interdisciplinary forms of visual expression, combining photography with similar practices that allow it to shed its dependence on a two-dimensional surface and redefine itself through its materiality. This physical and phenomenological experience allows the viewers to encounter new spatial displays of components that are photographic in origin, but sculptural in their visual aspects and effects, and brought together to create immersive installations.
She focuses on reductive photographic work placed in an independent context outside the sphere of mimesis, which can also be understood as a symptom of and reaction to the saturated iconosphere of the digital culture. A consequence of the latter is the current dubious relationship between photography and reality, which the artist seeks in the core of its materiality and the layers comprising it, following the principle of deconstruction and composition. For the artist, the impression of reality, once the essential quality of photography, is the moment of transformation itself, the moment when the reaction occurs as light hits the surface of a light-sensitive photographic emulsion, changing its chemical charge. The artist thus reverts in her practice to analogue processes, to analytically explore the specific processes and transformations that occur in photography, which gives her work an experimental nature. She is interested in showing an analogy of what actually happens during the process of taking and printing photographs, as well as the basic elements of photography, its specific materials and substances, the action of light and the other chemical reactions occurring in the (invisible) photographic processes. The artist exposes them as the general theme of her work, making them visible and preserving their potential for informing and transforming into new contexts and forms as they become the building blocks of the exhibition display. Ana Mizerit
An author's publication will be published together with the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design UMPRUM in Prague.
--------------------------------
Aleksandra Vajd graduated from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Ljubljana in 1997, and obtained an MFA in photography from the FAMU academy in Prague in 2001. From 2004 to 2006, she studied at the State University of New York in New Paltz on a Fulbright Scholarship.
She works as an academic and contemporary artist in Slovenia and internationally. In 2007, she was awarded the Recognition of Important Works of Art in photography by the University of Ljubljana and the Senate of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. In 2008, she was appointed Assistant Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, then in 2016 Assistant Professor and in 2021 Associate Professor of visual arts at the Academy of Visual Arts A.V.A. v Ljubljana. Since 2008, she has headed the Fine Arts Studio (VU4) at the Department of Fine Arts (KVU) of the Academy of Art, Architecture, and Design – UMPRUM in Prague.
She has had numerous solo and group presentations of her art and curatorial projects. She has also served as co-editor of the Fotograf magazine. Since 2013 she has been represented by the Drdova Gallery.
The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the National Gallery in Prague, the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design UMPRUM in Prague, and the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering of the University of Ljubljana.
