“Our health was not good In a particular place I could never use words If I reason I am not the state’s body Nor is the body someone It dreams no pronoun No, not an elevation of any kind, nor any plan Not even the happy closure Something, like nothing, happens anywhere[1]” Lisa Robertson

“Between the back door and the back stairs, I, as a toddler, covered by Mom and Dad, lying down, witness the rage of the lion coming down the stairs. I think I am the one who cause it, but I expect my father to tame him.[2]” Ion Grigorescu, 13.07.1971

I constantly wonder what time it is where you are brings together seven artists from various backgrounds who work primarily with photography or, if photography has not been the main medium of their artistic expression, it nevertheless continually played a vital role in combining it with other mediums.

Selected artists often use autobiographical references—memory, everyday routines, and personal events—as a fundament for their photographic, performative-photographic, and sculptural works. Measuring intimate distances means delving into and even analysing the environments they belong to. Relatives or loved ones frequently play a central role in their works; within the close surroundings of their lives, the production of artistic practice and the terms and conditions of its existence again and again merge. “I choose my medium according to how I want to spend my life, because I spend hours and hours in my process”[3] . Family albums, documents, everyday objects, or mundane acts are metamorphosed into catalysts, giving meaning to the elements of daily communal existence, uncovering not only personal testimonies but also depictions of society marked by a complex political history. In the engagement with organic and inorganic life, some of the artists on show step out of the anthropocentric into the vast realms of the more-than-human, rethinking the personal chronicles of materials and various ways of belonging.

The following exhibition isn’t an apology for intimacy or an excuse to champion it, but rather a modest suggestion that intimacy organises our lives and influences the experience of space. Pressing close is a touchy matter, based as much in fullness and endless bounty as in emptiness and lack—in mutual loss.

[1] Lisa Robertson, Palinodes, Chicago Review, Vol. 51/52, spring 2006
[2] Ion Grigorescu Diaries 1970-1975, Sternberg Press, 2014
[3] Charlotte Cotton, “In Conversation with Sophie Thun”, in: Sophie Thun, ed. by Phileas, Phileas and DISTANZ Verlag, 2022