Participating artists approach indexicality, image transmission processes and memory practices beyond the camera in various ways. This entails the activities of collecting, preserving, archiving, and reproducing personal and collective experiences and histories. Through different forms of abstraction, the artists explore collective myth-making, speculative archaeology, mourning processes, time, and energy fields. The artistic methods behind the works have been characterised by performativity, embodied knowledge and direct contact with the material.
The name Vera in the exhibition’s title does not refer to a specific person but to the word vera, which in Latin means true. It also links to artist Bitsy Knox’s work, which is based on the Christian saint Veronica, whose name means “true image”. Veronica is a combination of the Latin word “vera”, meaning “true”, and the Greek word “icon”, which translates to “image”. The title Vera Was Here alludes to the act of tagging or carving a name or the phrase “I was here” into a material as a memorial to someone’s presence in a place at a particular time, perhaps on a bus stop bench, at a landmark, or on a rune stone. The reference to this gesture is also an attempt to connect to the methods that recur in several works: making an imprint in a material through engraving, carving, rubbing, and colouring.
The seemingly human desire to immortalise one’s existence and surroundings has been expressed in particular through the photographic medium, which has long served as a truth-teller and witness. Indexicality has long been the premise of photography; that is, the photograph’s dependence on the motif and the image as a promise that the subject in front of the lens has existed. However, this premise has become obsolete in our age of artificial intelligence and deepfakes.
The exhibition at Accelerator presents several forms of this unbroken link between representation and referent. The works have causal ties to something that has existed, has happened or is happening in the present. They are not confined to a temporality; even if the works are anchored in the past, they continue to be animated in the space. The artists in the exhibition do not dwell on the original motif or its representation, but act in the gap of the indexical relationship. In the exploration of transfer processes and intermediary materials, there is a celebration of chance and the sensory breadth of the human body.
Curator: Therese Kellner
