Restless Transitions
with Radoslav Maglov
Goethe-Institute Sofia, Bulgaria
18.10.- 09.11.2018
Installation view: Restless Transitions, 2018
Photo: Radostin Sedevchev
This is not a gallery. It's a research laboratory, but from a different time. Not like today's sparkling white rooms with steamy cryogenic chambers, bubbling retorts and people in white coats and rubber gloves. It's a scientific study, a space for experiments, for the development of the strangest ideas and theories.
This is not a gallery. It's a research laboratory, shared and assembledby the restless work of Katharina Veerkamp and Radoslav Maglov. In this study nature meets human being, light meets the physical body. It's probably a paradox: although references to the Bible should have no place in a research laboratory, it is precisely these two extremes - the divine and the ordinary, the human - that meet here.
Here, light is not simply a photon stream of corpuscular and wave nature. Here its properties include much more than reflection and refraction, than diffraction and interference. Light is a substance of highly variable character and with the unlikely ability to pass from one state of matter to another, from one form to a second, a third, a tenth, to infinity. In her research, Veerkamp is able to record the transmutations and transformations of light on silk, paper and glass.
The results are delicate and ephemeral light imprints that vary in blue hues depending on the number of abstract theories with which Veerkamp previously infused the source materials.
In Veerkamp's work, silk has undergone the oldest aesthetic procedures to transform itself into a fairylike, airy material. Veerkamp uses this most delicate and fine material as a light-sensitive surface, as a canvas on which she paints with light. The scientific-artistic objects of Veerkamp are probably a perceptive attempt to catch the light and constantly try to give it a new form.
First it is seduced by the delicate silk, then it falls for the mirrors, is broken, passes nets and hurdles, bounces back and defends itself, only so that in the end, the accidentally fallen beam may free itself, but not without leaving its blue traces and imprints.
Just as Maglov experiments with living and non-living matter, Veerkamp explores light not only through the means of physics and photography, but also seeks its living imprints in nature. Or how the skin reacts to light - similarly to paper, how living tissue can be transformed into pulsating photography and light imprints.
And there, somewhere in the deep blue, one actually discovers medical images of light on the skin. Through the mediation of silk, Veerkamp and Maglov seek their answers about light and the body and their strange transformations and transitions from one aggregate state into another. A restless, feverish search that continues beyond this laboratory.
Stefka Tsaneva