NAILED SHADOWS
10.01-05.02.2025.
Photo Cluster, Vienna

The photograms of Krisztina Bóka speak volumes about the artist's intimate relationship with photography. Guided by her playful curiosity and her academic training as a sculptor, she is constantly experimenting with rendering spatial compositions on the flat surface of paper. A few years ago she made delicate sculptures out of photographic paper that double as pinhole cameras and can create their own photographs. That project earned her a degree at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.

 

Now, almost one hundred years after Moholy-Nagy’s complex Light-Space Modulator, Bóka turns to a creative light-shaping toolset much simpler, yet fundamental to any DIY project ever since the beginnings: hammer and nails. As if she was trying to assemble the image via nailing the shadows onto the paper, thus bestowing these ephemerae with a physical body. As looking at these images one cannot help but try to reconstruct the lighting setup of each of the compositions based on the lengths and angles of the shadows, Peter Pan’s shadow comes to mind, too, revealing a different story of capturing these shadows as hostages, until they give us enough evidence to reconstruct the circumstances of their own capture. The poor things.

 

These works also lend themselves to cheesy metaphors of (electronic) music, permitted by the fact that nailing is a rhythmic and repetitive act itself. The spacing of the nails gives the compositions a grid or tempo, the power of the light dictates loudness, velocity, the angle of the light creates groove through swing or syncopation and secondary lighting adds delay, up until we arrive in an immersive, rich soundscape. Let’s get lost!

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text: Tamás Domonkos Németh