Heerz Tooya gallery Veliko Tarnovo 23.02. – 17. 03.  
2019

I can’t remember the last time I did a headshot for my modeling agency. Someone else’s photo is etched onto my retinas. Is it hatred? Guilt? Envy? Love? The memory of that photo is an ongoing burning sensation, an overexposed agenda, which exists only to conceal the true nature of who I am. Why is it that other people’s photos and their stories suddenly seem so much more real than my own? Perhaps because I am finally detAched from my own memories, like a walking dead experiencing a Nickelodeon theater. Guilty pleasures for so little effort.

There is always an “I” in a photo – isn’t there? A headshot isn’t only something stored digitally, but also something made visible and permanent by chemical treatment. Not only does it reveal the visible “I” by how, when and where the photo was taken, but also by how its secrets are brought into a contract with its spectator. Yet, that contract, the obvious exposure, starts to etch your retinas as well, with a magnitude of confusion, doubt and curiosity. Your own lens suddenly becomes a memory of its own, when etched onto your empirical data, evidence begins to speak its own language.

Memory, time and identity together situate a perfect blend that erupts as a strange tentacular growth in your mind. A familiar, yet bizarre simulacrum of existence starts to appear on the photos you are confronted by. Its semi-amnesiac trope is the secret revealed in between the exhibition and your experience of it. The memento is the scars, cuts and bruises. You could ask yourself why it seems so familiar? It seems we are tricked to think that our photographic memory has an immune system disorder. Particularly in this line of thought, we are left with something neither eternal nor transient; a perverted sense of self carried through a retinal detAchment.

 Lars Nordby