Hristina Tasheva’s newest book, Far Away From Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery (Self-published, 2023), is an ambitious attempt at mapping the disparities between two national experiences of Communism in the twentieth century — the Dutch and the Bulgarian — as they were impacted by the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. The […]
Growing up in the capital city of Kyiv in the late 1970s, Yelena Yemchuk felt inexplicably drawn to Odesa, a city recognized for its independence and defiance to Soviet control. Visiting for the first time in 2003, decades after immigrating to America in 1981, Yemchuk returned in 2015 with the objective of developing a photographic […]
In sleep or in wakefulness, we are inhabited by images. Swimming just below the surface, they sometimes dash before us with the swoop of the flying fish. Slippery, they can be hard to hold onto. We are a repository of latent images that linger within us, awaiting to be conjured. Whilst the primary visual cortex […]
“The other reason is the question of memory – in line with the invention of the medium, mass images of the dead emerged in the second half of the 19th century. A fashion wave that is not only reserved for the nobility and clergy, but also for simple people, in order to have a portrait, a memory picture of someone at all”. -Felix Hoffman
“… no matter what conjecture there is about his death on the beach of Ostia under the wheels of his own car, genital’s hammer-smashed and reeking of Vatican gasoline, throat laced with limp skin from broken bone between sand and sea, his light lingers on…” The Films of Pier Paolo Pasolini are without doubt established […]
“He accepted his death and was going to show me how it should be done. The last lesson a man can teach his son.”
“The images are works of art. They exist in art historical categories and they evade an inherent use of death as either a procedural epistemology or body shock tactic”
“The phoenix condition is a dilemma that is induced by trauma. The person operating under its influence must find absolute zero in order to rebuild and rejuvenate oneself against the grain that death provides”
“I am a creature of consumerism. And I consume this kind of image myself; I would not be able to work with them if I wasn´t”
“Perhaps it is a fantasy that one could wield power over the representation of death by its abstracted nature? Is this not a dangerous game to play god over the image of death?”
“What we cannot speak, we must pass over in a meaningless system of categorization.”
There are no names, just awkward glue marks and yellowing tape- completing a metaphor for the supine bodies within.