Documents, 2010 – 2012
With each image in this series, I present the audience with an artefact, a document of
Photography, in a conceptual play to subvert the associated with it idea of seamlessly recording
everything that stands out there in the world in front of the camera’s lens. I enter a performative
act of slashing the surface of an unexposed 5×4˝ black and white negative. A cameraless image
produced from scanning the processed negative becomes the witness of this violent act as it
carries all the traces of my forceful gesture that disturbs the flatness of its seamless surface. The
visual result is an abstract pictorial space, which seems to be ‘bleeding’ from the traces caused by
the deformation act of slashing.

The work is concerned with issues regarding the utopian idea of ‘flatness’ of modernist painting
and the ‘seamlessness’ of photography, which I challenge by engaging in the abstract expressionist
act of slashing the medium’s surface that resonates with Lucio Fontana’s 1960 Spatial Concept
`Waiting’. But unlike Fontana’s elaborate act of cutting the raw canvas, here I have forcefully
violated the surface of the negative in an attempt to beat its resistance. Blindly handling the
negative in a dark bag, my only guide were the tactile sensations between my hands and the
materiality of the negative.

All images ©Eva Kalpadaki