Nina Porter at a. SQUIRE

The long-exposure photographs in this exhibition are the forensic observations ofthe pinhole cameras shown alongside them. Collectively titled Mystics, they register the cameras’ attempts to access and metabolise their surroundings. 

These cameras are cumbersome instruments. By their exaggerated proportions they bear a primary relationship to architecture and the metrics thereof. They are heaved from site to site: strapped to Porter’s balcony in Frankfurt’s red-light district, pressed up to a keyhole, or propped inside a domestic boiler cupboard. With pricks of light,they endoscopically image the infrastructures into which they are inserted. The artist is their agent, annotating their ossified exteriors with tallies, drawings and codes that record their situations. As seeing objects they remain hermetic, and they are evasive despite their stasis. Only the resulting prints reveal their insectile visions and indifferent gazes—often looking in multiple directions at once. 

The photographs render minor spaces and ordinary scenes ineffable, oscillating between macro and infinitesimal, information and void.In cold, technological hues,they read as stratified x-rays.They are presented in elongated Perspex frames like microscope slides that have, by an ironic development, been dramatically enlarged. Each frame holds both the positive print and the negative, the latter obscured behind the former.* With this work, Porter continues to disembowel and reconstitute the apparatuses of film, and vision is an entity. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a limited publication, Maps for Mystics. 

Nina Porter (b. 1994, London) lives and works between London and Frankfurt, where she is currently a guest of Prof. Gerard Byrne at the Städelschule. From 2022–2023 she attended the Schule Friedl Kubelka für Unabhängigen Film in Vienna. She has presented her films at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; The Austrian Film Museum, Vienna; Biblioteka, London; and The Horse Hospital, London. In September she carried out a research residency in the archive of Fernand Deligny at l’Abbaye d’Ardenne in Northern France.