Having Entered the Elusive Archive of Zenta Dzividzinska (Summer 2021)
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- Having Entered the Elusive Archive of Zenta Dzividzinska (Summer 2021)
- 2022
- photographs and photograms on baryta paper, steelplate on plywood, magnets
- 425 × 127,5 cm
For the project “Having Entered the Elusive Archive of Zenta Dzividzinska,” Sophie Thun worked with the archive of Latvian artist Zenta Dzividzinska (1944–2011). She examined and developed the contents of Dzividzinska’s photographic archive together with the archivist Līga Goldberga in the summer of 2021. In a way akin to that of Thun, Dzividzinska had dealt with photographic self-representation in an experimental way. Thun, for her presentation of this artist’s output, first set up a darkroom and exposed the negatives. She then arranged the prints and test strips on panels for viewing and ultimately chose to mount her series of re-printed photographs with magnets on two metallic plates: on the day of the opening of her Vienna show, these plates started out empty and were then gradually filled with fresh prints from the darkroom. Thun printed all of the self-portraits from a roll of film shot at a studio where Dzividzinska had worked, and she decided to also include the unsuccessful and botched shots that had never been printed but did indeed relate to her own artistic practice. The aspect common to both artists’ work is an underlying interest in a form of self-representation that relies on performance rather than on idealistically stylized strategies of depicting the self in a marketable way. W.S.