Project on Photography

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Ema Lančaričová is a visual artist who mainly works with analog and instant photography. Her artistic research focuses on exploring the essence of photography by utilizing primary variables such as time, light, and space as well as their negations. Her approach is both philosophical and experimental simultaneously, as she examines the nature of photography and its relationship to the world. She considers workshops an exciting way of sharing these approaches with people, including historical photographic techniques and new ways of working with instant photography. Workshops are the perfect place for starting a discussion of understanding what photography means to people and changing one’s relationship to creating and archiving photographs. She views these workshops as an adventure rather than a traditional approach to achieving a perfect outcome, due to the imperfections of the used materials. For example, precision is not possible when using Polaroid, and the resulting pictures have specific colours and different flaws. Additionally, unexpected things can happen while taking photos, and Ema takes advantage of these specifics in her artworks. Her crucial project began to emerge in 2019 with the theme Utopia, and after that came a project called Ramble, both of which are ongoing. In 2020, she received a scholarship for working on the Aperture project, which was exhibited in Gandy Gallery, Bratislava. Projects such as Aperture and Utopia are fundamentally based on the repetition of a selected motive and show utopian tendencies and the search for other worlds, an oscillation between the tangible and intangible, between temporality, transience, and the possibility of archiving, concerning originality. In her theoretical works, Ema examines the changes in the photographic medium nowadays. As art and technology continue to evolve, she researches the impact of modern technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and computational photography on the art form. Her reflections on these changes help her to expose them to mutual influence and integrate them into her artistic work. She recently obtained her doctoral degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava and continues to develop an understanding of what photography is.