|
CONSTRUCTED GEOMETRIES
space / time / memory Curator and text by Cristina Stoenescu Anca Poterașu Gallery 30th March – 31st May, 2017 History repeats itself. History is interpreted. Gradually, the individual memories emerge from the central historical discourse – they reshape it, they nuance it. The past becomes the present in various ways, but memory is its instrument. Memory operates at an individual level, at a collective level. It creates repetitions and conflicts, ellipses and spaces on top of which other memories are built. At the beginning of her career, Aurora Király used black and white photography as an artistic medium through which she was exploring a tactile reality, made out of textures and light, within a profoundly intimate and personal space. The photographs from the Melancholia series (1998 – 2000) capture the then-present moment of a passing emotional state of mind, a photo-journal of sorts. However, memory intervenes as a verb, not as a noun. Memory takes work (Andreas Huyssen). Other spaces are created following memory as action. The series Viewfinder (2014 – 2016) and Viewfinder Mock-up (2016 – 2017) are built from the same themes, objects and photographs that Aurora Király had created in the previous years, during the 1990s and the 2000s, in order to materialize the past-present process. |
Time splits as the photographs taken during the early years of the artist become horizon lines of fictitious realities, open to interpretations and fragile. Aurora Király builds spaces around them through slits and double folds using drawings and cardboard materials. By exhibiting them, the simulacrum created by strata of interpretative readings becomes a common space, a search that is shared with that otherwise elusive Other. The tactility of the photographs makes the imagery transform, grow out of its frame and reconfigure for another sensorial experience, building bridges in time.
This possible and shifting inter-connectivity is inversed in the collages of News Remix (2017). The point of origin is the relative present for this series. It is encompassed in the Dadaist-inspired collage, made out of words found in the contemporary international and Romanian media. Yet the present takes time. Aurora Király surveys the discursive common space in leaps in order to capture a collective consciousness which refracts and reflects through individual experiences – a private public space. The collages, just as the Viewfinder series, become objects, layered capsules of time and space, which configure different geometries and visual experiences onto to the past. Aurora Király faces a continuous reconciliation between an ever-changing past and an ineffable present. The bridge between them, the architecture of what she builds is made out of a commonly shared want to seize the moment and the simultaneous instinct to live in the next one. Her photographic journal is bound to grow, develop further and leave traces in drawings, folds and cardboard, cut and pasted pieces of news, of histories she might have lived and of other spaces where we might have met. |
