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Mapping Tensions: Cartography of Distorted Boundaries

Kristine Krauze Slucka

MAPPING TENSIONS: CARTOGRAPHY OF DISTORTED BOUNDARIES (2024, MMCA Residency Changdong, Seoul, South Korea). This work explores the fluidity and fragility of borders, drawing on the aesthetics of cartography to distort and reshape forms. The lines and contours, typically employed to define and separate, are bent and blurred, challenging the viewer's perception of stability and territory. Influenced by shifting geopolitical landscapes, each line embodies tension, each contour echoes the transient nature of political boundaries. Through this distortion, the piece reflects on the paradox of borders as both real and imagined constructs. It suggests that what is deemed ‘fixed’ is often anything but — subject to external forces and internal conflicts that erode their permanence. Media: Silver Gelatin photographic paper “Universal -1”, Kyiv, Ukraine. Expired 1991, exposed 2024.
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The Artist
Kristine Krauze Slucka
Nominated in
2022
By
Kristine Krauze Slucka
Lives and Works in
Latvia
Kristīne Krauze-Slucka explores the materiality of industrially produced objects as a foundation for pseudo-social anthropological inquiries. Her creative approach mirrors that of a hunter-gatherer, navigating the world through observation, chance, and intuitive associations. She creates objects, installations, and works with photography not merely as a visual medium but as a tactile, sensory experience, emphasizing the material and physical processes involved in image-making. Krauze-Slucka holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Visual Communication Department of the Latvian Academy of Arts. She was awarded the Grand Prix of the Nordic and Baltic Young Artist Award in 2020 and has been twice nominated for the prestigious Purvītis Prize.
More projects by this artist
2020

Vibrations Of the Material Universe

VIBRATIONS OF THE MATERIAL UNIVERSE. THIRST FOR GOLD, 2020-2021, analogue colour photographs using Kodak Ektacolor RA4 chemical process. The work seeks to make visible otherwise invisible threat to the biosphere, contributed from analogue photographic image-making, where I slowly create a layer of water on a light-sensitive photographic paper and carefully inject the photo chemicals into it. For me, it serves as a universal gesture, where the aesthetics of hand made pollution is revealed.

Orgatopia

Plants, like humans, are organic structures and experience anxiety resulting from changing external environmental conditions and ecosystem pollution. The installation is a speculative dystopian scenario in which not only the most resistant plants survive, but they are able to create new synergies with inorganic materials and technological mechanisms.

Orgatopia is a manipulative study of the resistance of plants, influencing their physiology by various mechanical methods over several months. By combining these manipulated plants with other inorganic materials and electronic solutions, biomorphic, kinetic hyperobjects are created.

2020

Obedient touch

In times when knowledge and services are compressed into ready-to-use packages, we slowly turn into ready-to-make subjects ourselves. Functions of a touch-sensitive ruler of time-space are carried out by the first and second fingers of a human hand. It transfers biometric data from the body to the cloud, founding a collection of data for tomorrows politics.How to experience this obedient touch and how does our existence change depending on whether we accept the terms and conditions or not? There is no middle way. Touch ID-agree. Using large-format analogue media, the artist focuses on the physical transfer of her biometric data to analogue photo paper. Repeating the everyday swiping of fingers over digital devices, photographically dark space is created, in which unique contours of lines and swirling patterns are illuminated.However, this space-time journey is observed by satellites of various intentions, whose selfish interests are to create the illusion that the choice is in human hands. Don't think, give me your finger! Watch, tap, watch, tap, watch, tap. Look! Click here, here, here, here, here! I know you like it! Media: 106 x 140cm, Fomabrom Variant 112 FB Photo paper with silver chlorobromide emulsion, mounted on aluminum composite material.

Echo

The more we live in the digital cloud, the more it merges with the physical reality that makes us "online" on our own. This parallel world promises to be instantly connected, where the question arises - with what?

The undeniable presence of the digital environment has not only changed our relationship with physical reality, but has also become a worrying phenomenon at the level of the individual and society, affecting the way we perceive and experience life around us. Photography as a medium has also emerged in the context of technological change, significantly expanding our perceptions. Photography allows us to observe the world more widely, but can it also become a catalyst for new or alternative models of relationships with the environment? Even today, the connection with technology raises the question of whether we, as organic structures, are moving towards loneliness and social alienation, or will we still be able to adapt to the new and artificial state of digital mediation? This parallel world not only actualizes our connection with nature, but also our relationship with personal memories. Can technology replace nostalgia? Rather, does it contribute to the creation of a new world?