Anu Vahtra

Pod ścianą. Pamięć ślepiej uliczki / On the Fence: Memories of a Dead End, 2015

video projection

screen at Solec Street

 

Anu Vahtra walks along a fence in Nowy Port. Through the cracks and gaps she tries to look at the fragmented landscape on the other side. The video On the Fence: Memories of a Dead End consists of both static and mobile looped images of fences and walls, which the artist piles up in layers, multiplying, fragmenting and deforming them. The result is a video collage, which refers to the incompleteness of perception and memory of places but is also an attempt to fill with new content empty spaces deprived of their function. The images projected in the cul‑de‑sac in Solec Street are both a quotation from the surrounding urban landscape and a symbolic shifting of meanings within the found situation, a sui generis reality ‘bulge’. At the same time, the work is an attempt to capture the panorama of an urban landscape on the flat surface of the screen. The artist has cast the spectator in the role of a flâneur, who, ‘since the meaning of what he sees cannot be made explicit, […] can let his imagination roam.’  (Z. Bauman)

Anu Vahtra (b. 1982) – lives in Tallinn, Estonia. She graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts and from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She has also studied at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Norway. Vahtra has participated in various exhibitions and collaborative projects across disciplines since 2004.

Vahtra’s work focuses on photography and large-scale spatial installation dealing with space and its characteristics, as well as the boundary between the second and third dimension. Vahtra was nominated for the Sadolin Art Prize (2014) and the Kristjan Raud Award (2015). In 2015 she won the Köler Prize, the art award launched by the Contemporary Art Museum Estonia (EKKM).

Contact

Instytut Kultury Miejskiej

Długi Targ str. 39/40, Gdańsk
e-mail: info@narracje.eu · www.ikm.gda.pl

Media contact: marta.bednarska@ikm.gda.pl, tel. 784 594 003

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Narracje 7

Narracje 7