Eva Chapkin (b. 2003) was born in Chișinău, grew up in Tiraspol, Transnistria, received Bulgarian citizenship through her maternal line, and subsequently moved to Romania - first to Constanța, then to Bucharest, where she completed her undergraduate studies at the National University of Arts. The artist's biographical trajectory, marked by successive transitions between geographies, languages, and identities, constitutes not merely the context but the very raw material of her artistic practice.
Working with photography, Eva Chapkin obsessively returns to the image of her own body as a space of negotiation between belonging and estrangement. The frontal approach to her own representation is part of a continuous reconstruction of the self, creating subjects out of backgrounds - more precisely, out of the places she passes through. In this sense, the image, for Eva Chapkin, is a personal mnemosyne: a Warburgian montage of an obscure and intimate micro-history, a mnemonic journal of permanent displacements. This transitive condition and this way of being in the world are simultaneously a means of expression and of inquiry. Photography thus acquires the function of a witness to emotional geographies, inverting the trauma of dislocation by imprinting the spaces that temporarily shelter her with her own image. In her works, the body assumes the role of index of instability - of social and political context - subject to the same forces of change and resettlement that describe the condition of a figure always caught between borders and cultures. (...)
