The art of Szilvia Bolla, which has started with abstract anti-photographs reacting against the obligated self-design (Boris Groys) and the depressive overconsumption of pictures, now arrived at a post-photographic praxis that tackles the subject of depression itself. Onto-Photo-Logical-Anxiety was the title of one of her earliest series, naming the central concern of her first period, reacting to the post-internet and post- (social-)media condition with emphatically material, non-figurative, cameraless photographs. Reaching a minimalist, “naked” form of photography with UV printing luminograms was not the end but the beginning, however, when she started to approach the non-figurative images themselves as figures, turning them into spatial, sculptural, installative entities, oscillating between the material and immaterial, the visible and invisible, object and image. In the Exoskin series, Bolla turned the concern of the corporality of the photograph into the photographical nature of the corpus. In 1931, Benjamin wrote: “Details of structure, cellular tissue, with which technology and medicine are normally concerned – all this is, in its origins, more native to the camera than the atmospheric landscape or the soulful portrait.” It is as if Bolla’s Exoskin series were an elaboration of this early hypothesis, building on the poetic but also scientifically accurate analogy that membrane tissue is a light-sensitive entity like photographic emulsion, capable of recording psychic imprints, while there are striking similarities between the structure of photographic papers and that of the skin. The Exoskin series also marked Bolla’s first attempt to thematize mental disorders through psychosomatic symptoms appearing on the surface of the body.

Barnabás Zemlényi-Kovács