Process Anatomy #4: Marta Djourina. Travel Light

Process Anatomy №4. Travel Light, Marta Djourina

The final exhibition of the curatorial series Process Anatomy presents Travel Light by Marta Djourina. The project is an offshoot of her earlier work From: Me / To: Me, 2012 – 2016 in which the artist sends pinhole cameras from herself to herself documenting their journey that took several days.

Currently, on December 8, a day before the exhibition opening, Marta will take a trip from Berlin to Sofia – a journey intrinsic and important to her personal and professional history. Leaving her personal belongings behind and converting her luggage – two suitcases, into oversized pinhole cameras that will not only accompany her on her trip but also capture the process of the journey. The size of each of the resulting unique pieces is determined by the rules that the airline company has set in regards to the hand luggage restrictions.

The space will be complemented by various test strips of her ongoing series of cameraless photography, representing a journey of light becoming image, eerie, yet vibrant abstract landscapes. On the backside are symbols that are well known to us – letters and numbers, but they are cryptic, a code, a technical language that is still incomprehensible to us, acting as a layer of protection to the innermost world of the artist.

Marta Djourina embarks on this journey, a journey not only a metaphor of the artistic process, but the method itself by which the work is created. The trip and it’s duration becomes the framework in which the unexpected plays a pivotal role. A process of documenting not only the movement of the artist between two places, two moments and two homes, telling us a story of belonging and and sparking notions of nostalgia. But also a process of recording the choreography of the airport, a non-place, a symbiotic system of workers, bureaucracy and machines indifferent to the personal stories of migration and affect.

The work also questions the framework in which art is created – the often precarious conditions in which artists have to work and produce. Travelling to do research or exhibiting is often unaccounted for, so what better way to produce an artwork than, literally, on the road to the exhibition.

This exhibition is a fitting end to a curatorial programme named Process Anatomy. What we have tried to do is reverse engineer the processes of artists with innovative practices, responding to the complexities of the contemporary world. Here the process is no longer hidden, waiting to be revealed or analysed. The process is the work and it is the final result that awaits to be uncovered.

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Marta Djourina (born in Sofia) studied at the UDK (Berlin University of the Arts) and at the Glasgow School of Art. Her works have been shown in numerous exhibitions, most recently at the Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Moder Art, Sofia Arsenal – Museum of contemporary Art, FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph (Berlin) , 3:e Väningen (Gothenburg), Mark Müller (Zurich), CAN (Neuchâtel). She has received the BAZA Award for Contemporary Art (2021), the Eberhard-Roters grant (Preussische Seehandlung Foundation, awarded at the Berlinische Galerie, 2020), the AArtist in residence at the Federal Foreign Office (2022) and the Goldrausch Künstlerinneprojekt (2022).

The project is realized with the financial support of the National Culture Fund.
Graphic Design: Yana Abrasheva

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