Sara Rman: In Process
At first glance, Sara Rman's photographic practice may seem to belong to a different field of creation – her works distress and distort materials to such an extent that it is difficult to recognise their primary function in the exhibited objects. The working process of the artist, who still considers photography as her starting point, often begins in the darkroom, where she feels most at home – collecting a wide variety of photographic papers, experimenting with emulsion and light, and seeking to extract unpredictable effects from various materials. She approaches her work with an unencumbered curiosity, often using discarded materials or experimenting with expired film. Since she is primarily interested in the materiality of the photographic medium, she also manipulates it in other ways. She exposes it to burning, bending, chemicals, paint, water and other elements that transform it beyond recognition. Although the final works retain a reference to photography, the process makes her practice distinctly performative, not least because the artist never considers the process finished and always sees in it the possibility of further manipulation of the material.
The title of the exhibition refers to the latter idea, recalling her commitment to research, experimentation and play as essential elements of her artistic practice. In this exhibition, she presents a variety of approaches, combining works from the series Medium, 4×5'', Pastels, Solar Texture, Carrier, Abyss and others. It is clear already from their titles that the artist's work questions the medium of photography, searching for its alternative functions and changing forms, while the artist questions the limits of the material with each individual work and, through mechanical manipulation, transforms it into forms that disrupt the viewer's perception of its origins. The perception of the viewer is as important to Sara Rman as the materiality of the object – she uses different lighting methods to create spatial installations that reveal different forms and textures depending on the audience's perspective and angle. In this way, she also adds a certain degree of interactivity to the work, as the final form of the object is only revealed through the way the observers themselves look at it. In her photographic practice, she most often questions the indexical quality of the medium, its alternative functions that go beyond mere image-forming capacities and arbitrariness. Above all, over time, her objects are always changing, disintegrating or expanding, rather than remaining trapped in a single form.
Hana Čeferin
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sara Rman (1992) works with different media in arts and crafts. The photographic medium serves her as a tool of expression, a means of exploring the concepts of identity, the dimensions of the field of freedom and raw aesthetics. In 2017, she received the Outstanding Academic Achievement Award for her diploma thesis Svobodni duh časa (The Free Spirit of the Times). She has held numerous exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad – over the past three years, her work has been on view at the Škuc Gallery, R SPACE and the Alkatraz Gallery in Ljubljana, the Račka Gallery in Celje,within the context oftheexhibitions Haunted House of Horror (London) and After All (Krakow), as well as at a solo exhibition Swallow Your Pride (Košice).
