Across intersecting rooms, two bodies of work coalesce. Each body is centered on a speculative instrument: a tool or image-making device. Between them unfolds a shared vocabulary of anticipation, care, and latent potential.
In the gallery’s first room, a series of black-and-white analogue contact prints trace the durations of medical appointments attended over a period of five months. The camera used to make them was a backpack, retrofitted with a pinhole aperture placed between its two handles. When worn, the aperture would face the small of the back, adopting the carrier’s body as the camera’s shutter. At the start of each appointment, the bag was put down in any provision of space provided. Inadvertently, the pinhole was uncovered to light. With the end of each appointment, the backpack was collected to leave. This homemade device, in turn, became a register for care through its capacity to draw pure dichotomies of light and shadow, movement and stillness, time spent or lost.
Spilling from the back room onto the gallery’s stage, spherical wooden cameras lie in wait. Turned, split, and hollowed, this network of vessels resembles large seeds or cells—each with a uniquely structured interior and a forthcoming date indicated on its surface: winter ’35, autumn ’62, for the year 2050. Some may one day hold light-sensitive material that captures a glimpse of their designated moments. Others may remain sealed, complete in their unfulfilled potential. Their activation depends on a confluence: circumstance, desire, and treatment by their future possessor. The obsolescence of these tools therefore lies in the relations set up between two people.
Meanwhile, a row of containers anticipates their travelling afterlives. Each will hold a simple note:
Cameras made to roll ~~~ into the future. Built in 2025, for use in ____________.
Nina Porter (b. 1994, UK) lives and works between London and Frankfurt.
Recent exhibitions have been held at a. SQUIRE, London; Sweetwater, Berlin; and Petrine, Paris with Kobby Adi. Recent screenings include The French Institute, London; Mackintosh Lane, London; The Austrian Film Museum, Vienna; and The Horse Hospital, London. In 2023, she carried out a research residency in the archive of Fernand Deligny at l’Abbaye d’Ardenne in Northern France. She received her BA from The Slade School of Fine Art, London, and studied in the class of Prof. Gerard Byrne at Städelschule, Frankfurt.
