11. The Enigma (from the series: 'The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations') Aleksandra Vajd

About the work

11. The Enigma (from the series: 'The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations')

The title is taken from the eponymous text of the French writer Georges Polti (from the 19th century) who put forward a thesis claiming that in human stories and situations we can trace 36 different dramatic situations, no more no less. Photograms are forming individual units that can be viewed as models of mental states, examples of enduring and real human dilemmas as indexes of all 36 dramatic situations. Each unit represents one situation based on human emotions (supplication, deliverance, disaster, madness, etc). 

With the monochromatic photograms I don’t provide any clear information but I want the viewer to perceive it as a colour that is being caught in some sort of light sensitive emulsion. The emulsion has the potential to create information where the black parts of the photograms represent an imaginable image that can’t be seen because it is overexposed. The projection could have happened there but we can’t see it. The work is therefore on the theoretical boundary of potentiality.

Bio

Aleksandra Vajd graduated from veterinary medicine at the University of Ljubljana In 1997. Today the Prague and Ljubljana based Slovenian artist is a graduate of the Photography Department at FAMU and New York State University at New Paltz. In 2021, she became an assistant professor at the Academy of Visual Arts in Ljubljana where she teaches seminar on Theory and practice of Photographic medium. She has run the Studio Of Photography at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design / AAAD in Prague since 2008.