Dafna Talmor’s second solo exhibition at TOBE Gallery in Budapest.
Dafna Talmor: Constructed Landscapes (vol. III)
13 April - 21 May, 2022
TOBE Gallery, Budapest
An investigation into representations of landscape, Constructed Landscapes is a project I’ve been developing for over ten years; Consisting of three sub-series, the work stemmed from my personal archive of photographs initially shot as mere keepsakes across different locations that include Venezuela, Israel, the US and UK. Produced by collaging medium format colour negatives, the process relies on experimentation in the colour darkroom.
Transformed through the act of slicing and splicing, the resulting images are staged landscapes, a conflation combining the ‘real’ and the imaginary. Through this work, specific places initially loaded with personal meaning and political connotations, are reconfigured into a space of greater universality. Blurring place, memory and time - defying specificity and referring to the transient - the work alludes to idealised and utopian spaces.
In Constructed Landscapes, condensing multiple time frames by collaging negatives to construct an image transfers the notion of the ‘decisive moment’ from the photographic act to the act of assembling and printing in the darkroom. In turn, fragments of varying source images collide and collude to create an illusory landscape; gaps and voids where negatives fail to meet or overlap mimic (and form new) elements of landscape, disrupting composition and distorting perspective.
In dialogue with the history of photography, Constructed Landscapes references Pictorialist processes of combination printing as well as Modernist experiments with the materiality of film. Whilst distinctly holding historical references, the work engages with contemporary discourse on manipulation and the analogue/digital divide. Beyond photographs, the work has expanded to include site specific vinyl wallpapers, spatial interventions, photograms, studies and publications.
Site-specific interventions have consisted of several iterations of a flatbed scan of a clear acrylic board - used to cut my negatives and protect my light box since the inception of the project - as source material. Over time, I became interested in the object beyond its practical function and the way in which the residue and traces of the incisions allude to the manual process in an abstract yet indexical way. Like a photographic plate, the embedded marks represent the manual labour and passing of time, acting as a pseudo document that continually evolves with each new incision.
Besides a series of spatial interventions, the cutting board has been used to produce several editions of direct colour contact prints to date. Alluding further to its subtle transformative nature, one could say the colour photograms bear a more analogous relationship via the preservation and reproduction of the one-to-one scale of the incisions. When printed, the orange reddish hues are in dialogue with the red flares – consequently transposed and scaled up from the cuts on the negatives - in the main exhibition prints.
Through the various components of the project, an intrinsic element of the work is embedded, suggested and explored within the photographic frame in a myriad of ways; Diverse forms of reproduction, representation and notions of scale that get played out aim to defy a fixed point of view, in terms of how images of – and actual - landscapes, are experienced and mediated. Inviting the viewer to move in and out of the frame, aims to encourage a more active way of looking and perpetuate a heightened awareness of one’s position as a viewer.
The exhibition entitled Constructed Landscapes (vol. III) at TOBE Gallery will include a book display to mark the release of Constructed Landscapes, a monograph published in 2020, longlisted for the 2021 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Awards and shortlisted for the FOTO WIEN Photobook Award 2022; as well a large-scale sculptural installation, produced for Filling the Cracks, a group show curated by Marcel Feil for Unseen Unbound. Playing with the idea of a plurality of viewpoints via multi-directional landscapes, the work defies traditional notions of a singular, fixed and idealised view. Constructed as one handmade negative at its source, generating multiple images which share a central element, elicit simultaneous horizontal and vertical readings. Purporting more dynamic/active ways of seeing, the work aims to reject a binary opposition of nature versus culture, and instead, alludes to the notion that human beings are implicated and complicit in the creation of a culturally constructed and politically loaded mediated landscape. A deconstructed square and black voids - negative spaces created due to the interlocking oppositional L- shaped elements - playfully reference, yet disrupt, the notion of a traditional photographic frame.
Dafna Talmor was born in Tel Aviv in 1974 and currently lives and works in London. Her diverse work includes education, video, fine arts and photography, but she has also worked as a curator. Her works are in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Deutsche Bank, Hiscox and the National Trust, as well as in many private collections abroad. TOBE Gallery has been representing her since 2017 and has already presented her works at several international fairs (Vienna Contemporary, MIA Fair, Photo London, UNSEEN Amsterdam).
