Exhibition Text

The second dialogical presentation expands Cora Pongracz’s series and exhibition of the same name, 8 erweiterte portraits, with works by Cypriot artist Marietta Mavrokordatou, which complement Cora Pongracz’s media-reflective and expanded understanding of portraiture and identity with the dimension of embodied and situated experience. Drawing on a phenomenological understanding of vision, Mavrokordatou repeatedly uses the camera in her artistic practice as an extension of the body – as an instrument that not only mediates perception, but also constitutes it. In this sense, her works operate in the interplay between body, medium, and perception and, much like Cora Pongracz, explore the potential of the photographic medium with regard to self-determined, experience-based forms of expression and multi-perspective narratives of the self.

With reference to the exhibition architecture, both works developed in dialogue with the exhibition 8 erweiterte portraits refer to the motif of the labyrinth – a spatially and symbolically charged site where paths, images, and meanings overlap, dissolve, and reconstitute themselves. In dialogue with Pongracz’s works, a visual rhythm unfolds, consisting of similarities, differences, and repetitions, though at the same time structured by interruptions and displacements. This dynamic creates a mode of reception reminiscent of the process of searching: moments of disorientation alternate with moments of recognition.

The work Untitled (The way back), 2025, exhibited in the final room, arranges 81 photographic slides within a slide carousel. The work takes up the motif of breadcrumbs from fairy tales—as a metaphorical aid that provides orientation, guides the way back home. The 81-part series of projected images thus becomes a photographic search – and preservation – of traces, revealing itself also only as a temporary trail of light: Traces of everyday life appear on personal items and everyday objects: on clothing, laptops, cell phones, and the lens of the camera. The macro lens chosen by Mavrokordatou allows for a detailed – yet simultaneously more abstract – perception of these minute particles and provides access to what is usually beyond one’s own reach and field of vision. Due to the specific functioning of the slide carousel, the projected images are arranged in a sequential narrative that has neither beginning nor end. In contrast to the classical logic of the photographic principle, that captures and fixes a single decisive moment, what emerges is rather a cyclical continuum: a loop that eludes any definitive interpretation and determination.

The work 6/1, 2025, continues this processual understanding of mediation, explicitly expanding it through the dimension of bodily experience. The gesture of transferring the rhythm of the carousel projector to the adjacent exhibition rooms creates a(nother) trail: of rhythmically modulated light conditions. What initially causes irritation upon entering gradually transforms into a rhythm that structures the perception of the photographs and subtly modulates their reception. The repetitive light pulses not only function as a visual element, but above all activate awareness of one’s own physical presence in the room: one’s position in relation to the projected images, and one’s perception of time and space. Only in the last room, in direct encounter with the work Untitled (The way back), 2025, does the full intention of this sequence become apparent: the mechanical repetition of the projector becomes a medium that conveys a complex interplay between sensory impression and subjective experience.As established in the works of Cora Pongracz, both of Mavrokordatou’s works – which also engage in dialogue with each other – refer to the photographic apparatus: the uniform, mechanical functioning of the slide projector – the repetitive clicking and flashing – sets the pace of the exhibition and simultaneously creates a mediated aesthetic experience in which the viewer’s perception, the medial staging, and the spatial situation are inextricably linked.