“Tour Life”
Five archival pigment prints, 53 x 80 cm each, in white wooden frames hang in the two Radio Athènes rooms. The tall, off-white curtains obstruct the view to the pedestrian street and lend an air of intimacy and poise to these photographs, which are otherwise explosive. Immaculate and weird in their indecipherability and painterliness, on the verge of being misrecognized as capitalizing on the indistinct luxuriousness of colour and refraction, they instead assimilate specific objects—vital for operating in normal, daily life, at least for some—in photography’s own tropes and materials.
“The Already Pictures”
“The Already Pictures” consists of a series of digital photographs, each titled Eye (2024), featuring glass marbles arranged in pairs. Each marble is positioned in front of another, allowing a view of one marble inside the other. This arrangement mirrors the alignments found in the game where players shoot marbles into a circle to knock others out, occurring before each turn; the fields of view of both the photographer and the player align. It also resembles an eye—a disembodied eye that floats freely, akin to a photographic lens detached from its camera, with no fixed perspective, making its orientation—left or right—indistinguishable. Thus, the props intended to be targeted in the game transform into apparently responsive perceivers of the forthcoming strike, as well as perceivers of the photographer and the viewer—all equally interloping, with the still life props capable of their own photographic expression, their own means of defence.
Distortion and refraction—optical effects produced by the marbles—are commonly exploited in the associated still life trope. However, here they are accentuated through the artist’s macro lens with a sense of restraint, preserving a semblance of realism despite the unnaturally zoomed-in perspective. Sharp and blurry elements are distributed in unexpected ways, preventing the image from being entirely still or fixed to a single surface. A language of photographic fluidity emerges, where subjects, objects, and their environments hypnotically amalgamate. What remains discernible is the variation of light traveling through each marble composition—sometimes daylight, sometimes artificial. This light intertwines with the room’s shifting illumination, dissolving the borders of the photographs and inviting contemplation on where the images might actually conclude.
Existing architecture from the previous exhibition, a series of shutters fixed on the windows to seal out light, is preserved yet reinterpreted by the artist. Several shutters have been retrofitted to open horizontally, allowing natural light to enter in specific ways. These are complemented by added spotlights that mirror the angles of natural light during the day, enabling an allied viewing of the photographs at night. Depending on the position of the viewer or time of day, the absence of ink on the archival pigment prints in the brightest areas reveals shapes unseen on screen through variations in texture, while the satin finish of the paper and ink elsewhere collects natural light in a sensor-like manner. Images register in space as space gently imprints itself on them. An overarching intention begins to emerge, where photography transforms into an epistemological principle through which everything else can be considered—an expression of photographic reverence.
—Maya Tounta
at Radio Athène & Akwa Ibom, Athens
until December 18, 2024