'Lucciole', a duo show with works by Edith Bories (FR, °1984) and Liesbet Grupping (BE, °1984), presents a poetic investigation into the unpredictable nature and precarious visibility of photographic images. Focusing on the ephemeral or accidental traces that are inscribed upon light-sensitive materials, both artists engage with the vicissitudes of photochemical processes to reveal phenomena that otherwise remain obscured. While Bories takes a damaged film roll, its emulsion unintentionally contaminated by seawater, as a starting point for a series of subtle colour drawings, Grupping points her large-format camera directly to the sky or to the sun for hours on end to examine how (an excess of) light and time are manifested photographically. Marked by abstract streaks, colour hazes, light specks and optical defects, the resulting images are characterized by an ethereal, almost otherworldly radiance, yet also show the unmistakable imprints of their tangible origins. Working against the apparatus or embracing the technical disruptions it engenders, Bories and Grupping elaborate an aesthetic of the incident that proves photography is a dynamic force of nature which can never be fully controlled.

Artists: Edith Bories, Liesbet Grupping