We are at the space of Galéria Mladých in Nitra where today begins the exhibition of Ema Lančaričová.
She is a photographer from Trnava, who is also a student in the photography department's final year at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava.
This exhibition is called Nemiesto/Nečas (Non-place/Non-time). The name describes one of her photo series included in the exhibition.
This series is called Utopia. Utopia is a non-place/non-time concept that projects in photography, according to her art style or opinion.
We can see pieces of Utopia in the space behind me and at the stairwell.
It's a series that presents technical failures and meaning failures in photography.
They are failures that present themselves as a subjective language in photography such as offset, blur.
They appear as an art product, but at the same time, they are somehow utopic ideas.
An object that presents the idea center of this exhibition is the pillar. This pillar is a prefabricated concrete piece of a factory.
It appears in various versions. There is a spatial installation of a 3.5 m tall pillar that presents itself
as a symbol of support in society, that continually appears in architecture and fills some connotative functions.
But at the same time, it's an expression, a metaphor for ruins that Ema tries to capture.
How the 20th century's society ruined what they built upon, and ruins are a medium of photography to a certain extent.
She demonstrates how photography falls on itself, on this pillar.
The word Utopia comes from Greek Ou-topos, a non-place.
I tried to think about the idea that photography by itself is a utopia because it's an idealized state.
I connect it with the literal meaning of non-place.
Photography is a cutout of time that can be 1/125, but we cannot identify what it is, what's the place, or state of it.
We can't precisely define it because it's not either the past, the future, or the present. It's something completely frozen in time.
At the exhibition, you can see analog photography. The most important part of the project is polaroid photography.
We can see 72 polaroid photos in a lightbox taken at the same place and approximately the same time.
But we can still sense the time continuity and the emulsion of polaroid pictures changed its colors. We can see the little nuances of these media.
The exciting part is that we can see the coincidence that can happen, and that means humans don't have full control of the camera because it's a machine.
Ema refers to the idea that photography, even though it presents itself as concrete, permanent, truthful, or objective, is, in reality, a utopia.
That with photography and ideas, we mentioned it's not possible to show the aforementioned properties.