Veils of Impermanence at Gossamer Fog

Elli Antoniou  /  Szilvia Bolla  /  Christina Cushing  /  Xavier Robles De Medina  /  Elinor Haynes  /  Eve Stotesbury  /  Viktor Timofeev
12 October – 10 November 2024

Tracing the outlines of an intangible interference of immaterial potentia, a deep state of liminality suspends a phantasmagoric cipher. That which is known to exist in the elusive grey areas, the Backrooms of human understanding; nebulous entities of impermanence, blurring the edges of perception. Light has beauty in darkness, its radiance fleeting, purely evanescent, fading to a fugacious delicate veil of shadows, disintegrating before it can be grasped. Vapour as a vessel of perception, diffuses in turbulent whisps, rippling and converging, intermingling with air in an ethereal dance of decay. Incorporeal performance of diffusion and abstraction, light catching curlicue caustics as they shimmer and melt from view. A layering of dissociative states, the outlines of objects become unstable… representation destabilising…We grasp at the barely visible, spiralling into the miasmic void, like a moth drawn to artificial light.

HEX#16161D, your one time passcode for the brain's grey, dark light you see. Observed with closed eyes in an absence of light, you see Eigengrau. Anti-existential realisation in the mind's eye - the image presented is not always the truth, as the psychological effect of screen time becomes a derealization of an online aura. This reverie spawns hypnagogic states manifested by an afterimage burnt onto retinas from a shining static. Overstimulation of the optic nerve conjures digital phosphenes - light born without light, flickering behind closed eyes, a luminous echo with no source. Streams of data undulate as perspectival shifts alter the surface, their flickering projections held within a temporal threshold, oscillating between potential optical states. Chromatic ruptures unravel into birefringence; the phenomenon of double refraction, scattering polarised and iridescent trails that dissolve into the ether as each fleeting ocular trace fades to the infinite.

Ghostly matter forms and deforms, neither here nor there; a penumbral spectre whose ubiquitous presence is felt yet unknown. An eerie fissure expanding in ephemeral space, triggering activation functions at our synaptic nodes, conjuring autonomous emotional response. An allusion to illusion of the technological spirit, the haunting of our eyes in the perception of reality. Transcendental disorientation created by sensorial dissonance, a directionless unknown, surrounded by clouds…which way is up? Alternate realities washing over you, enigmatic elements teasing the senses in flows of encrypted dreamlike transmission. Virtual hallucinations of the approximate inbetween; rubbed eyes blur at the sight of computer vision, unstable diffusion obfuscates original representation.

Media interfaces between translucent overlays displaying crystalised liquids, shiny surfaces punctured by binary light, the image distorted by artifacted corruptions, as a darkless digital intimacy sticks to the skin like a wet mist. Phenomenological evaporation through computational heat pressed against moist biological bodies. Witness the hallucinatory Resonance Cascade within vacuum interminus, greyscale ambiguity permeates the ungoverned dark pool’s liquidity gradually evaporating to reveal conflicting states of existence—between positive and negative, presence and absence….Dark energy hazing, reflected through dimensionless impermeable systems of an obscured logic. To absorb into the negative of the image, the antimatter of the aesthetic, something which sits outside of us, on the periphery of the perceptual. That which drifts amidst an unbounded pareidolic horizon.

Szilvia Bolla - Running Up That Hill

Curated by Barnabás Zemlényi-Kovács
Design by Áron Lődi

Glassyard Gallery, Budapest, Hungary
22 March - 24 May 2024

The art of Szilvia Bolla, which started with abstract anti-photographs reacting against the depressive overconsumption of pictures, now arrived at a post-photographic praxis that tackles the subject of depression itself. As depression is both individual and social, biological and political, the exhibition Running Up that Hill confronts the aesthetic and political dimensions of personal, transgenerational as well as systemic depression of a depressive economical-ideological system. The audio-visual installations, reconstructing autobiographical and symbolic mnemotopes, the pharmaco- kinetic sculptures of bodies deformed by the biopower, in addition to the neurograms based on the analogy between the photograph and the skin, are assembled as points in a depresthetic and psychopolitical manifesto.

Formal problems and problem-forms of Bolla, dismantling the dichotomies of the visible and the invisible, the material and immaterial, the dead and the alive, previously discussed in a photo-ontological and photo-critical context, here are reprogrammed to create a network of connections from Kate Bush to Walter Benjamin, from spectropolitics to Secession, or from black metal to material feminism.

The exhibition was supported by Stroom Den Haag.

Veils of Impermanence at Gossamer Fog

Elli Antoniou  /  Szilvia Bolla  /  Christina Cushing  /  Xavier Robles De Medina  /  Elinor Haynes  /  Eve Stotesbury  /  Viktor Timofeev
12 October – 10 November 2024

Tracing the outlines of an intangible interference of immaterial potentia, a deep state of liminality suspends a phantasmagoric cipher. That which is known to exist in the elusive grey areas, the Backrooms of human understanding; nebulous entities of impermanence, blurring the edges of perception. Light has beauty in darkness, its radiance fleeting, purely evanescent, fading to a fugacious delicate veil of shadows, disintegrating before it can be grasped. Vapour as a vessel of perception, diffuses in turbulent whisps, rippling and converging, intermingling with air in an ethereal dance of decay. Incorporeal performance of diffusion and abstraction, light catching curlicue caustics as they shimmer and melt from view. A layering of dissociative states, the outlines of objects become unstable… representation destabilising…We grasp at the barely visible, spiralling into the miasmic void, like a moth drawn to artificial light.

HEX#16161D, your one time passcode for the brain's grey, dark light you see. Observed with closed eyes in an absence of light, you see Eigengrau. Anti-existential realisation in the mind's eye - the image presented is not always the truth, as the psychological effect of screen time becomes a derealization of an online aura. This reverie spawns hypnagogic states manifested by an afterimage burnt onto retinas from a shining static. Overstimulation of the optic nerve conjures digital phosphenes - light born without light, flickering behind closed eyes, a luminous echo with no source. Streams of data undulate as perspectival shifts alter the surface, their flickering projections held within a temporal threshold, oscillating between potential optical states. Chromatic ruptures unravel into birefringence; the phenomenon of double refraction, scattering polarised and iridescent trails that dissolve into the ether as each fleeting ocular trace fades to the infinite.

Ghostly matter forms and deforms, neither here nor there; a penumbral spectre whose ubiquitous presence is felt yet unknown. An eerie fissure expanding in ephemeral space, triggering activation functions at our synaptic nodes, conjuring autonomous emotional response. An allusion to illusion of the technological spirit, the haunting of our eyes in the perception of reality. Transcendental disorientation created by sensorial dissonance, a directionless unknown, surrounded by clouds…which way is up? Alternate realities washing over you, enigmatic elements teasing the senses in flows of encrypted dreamlike transmission. Virtual hallucinations of the approximate inbetween; rubbed eyes blur at the sight of computer vision, unstable diffusion obfuscates original representation.

Media interfaces between translucent overlays displaying crystalised liquids, shiny surfaces punctured by binary light, the image distorted by artifacted corruptions, as a darkless digital intimacy sticks to the skin like a wet mist. Phenomenological evaporation through computational heat pressed against moist biological bodies. Witness the hallucinatory Resonance Cascade within vacuum interminus, greyscale ambiguity permeates the ungoverned dark pool’s liquidity gradually evaporating to reveal conflicting states of existence—between positive and negative, presence and absence….Dark energy hazing, reflected through dimensionless impermeable systems of an obscured logic. To absorb into the negative of the image, the antimatter of the aesthetic, something which sits outside of us, on the periphery of the perceptual. That which drifts amidst an unbounded pareidolic horizon.

Szilvia Bolla - Running Up That Hill

Curated by Barnabás Zemlényi-Kovács
Design by Áron Lődi

Glassyard Gallery, Budapest, Hungary
22 March - 24 May 2024

The art of Szilvia Bolla, which started with abstract anti-photographs reacting against the depressive overconsumption of pictures, now arrived at a post-photographic praxis that tackles the subject of depression itself. As depression is both individual and social, biological and political, the exhibition Running Up that Hill confronts the aesthetic and political dimensions of personal, transgenerational as well as systemic depression of a depressive economical-ideological system. The audio-visual installations, reconstructing autobiographical and symbolic mnemotopes, the pharmaco- kinetic sculptures of bodies deformed by the biopower, in addition to the neurograms based on the analogy between the photograph and the skin, are assembled as points in a depresthetic and psychopolitical manifesto.

Formal problems and problem-forms of Bolla, dismantling the dichotomies of the visible and the invisible, the material and immaterial, the dead and the alive, previously discussed in a photo-ontological and photo-critical context, here are reprogrammed to create a network of connections from Kate Bush to Walter Benjamin, from spectropolitics to Secession, or from black metal to material feminism.

The exhibition was supported by Stroom Den Haag.