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.
Under the auspices of an identity constituted through a series of processes opposed to the fixing of a personal and social self — through destabilization, transition, and affective contamination — the exhibition Dislocation proposes a reading of photography as a practice of permanent presence: a way of remaining in contact with oneself and with one’s own experience, precisely in those moments when that experience becomes most difficult to hold in place. At the same time, the exhibition moves beyond the thematic frame in the classical sense, and beyond narrative linearity. It functions instead as a montage — an accumulation of obsessions, recurrences, and fragments — that describes Eva Chapkin’s practice over recent years. The series of works brought together in the exhibition capture the way the artist operates with her own body in relation to the environments, situations, and objects toward which she carries a form of affectivity.
