Michaela Davidová
The Metabolising Analogue

Works presented in Michaela Davidová's exhibition manifest an approach to environmental photography balancing on the border between artistic research and procedural creation. Davidová explores alternative analogue photographic processes in the context of the digestive metabolic processes of organisms. Filamentous fungi and root systems penetrate the bowels of photography, nibbling and decomposing its matter. Substance, energy transformation, and the relationships between materials and human and non-human entities reveal possibilities of ecological and posthumanistic thought within photographic practice. 

Davidová has long been engaged in the materiality of photography; the properties of photographic paper, the chemical composition of the natural substances used, and their interaction in the analogue photographic process of the darkroom. In this approach, photography becomes a living organism, processing, digesting, excreting and recording the results of transformation on the surface of the photographic paper. The artist explores the material through the action of the very substances she uses in her experimental photographic processes, which create their own, unpredictable, pictorial trace rather than through her own human gaze.  Davidová emphasizes the process and understanding of the thin permeable layers that exist between humans and nature.   

Michaela Davidová (*1988) is an artist and researcher born in Ostrava currently living and working in Tilburg, the Netherlands. She graduated with a BA in Artist, Designer: Maker in Cardiff (UK) and an MA in Ecology Futures from Den Bosch (NL). She also leads workshops on alternative photographic processes, is a coordinator of the bio art [MI] Lab v CARADT and is co-curator of projects at the SEA Foundation in Tilburg. She collaborates with the community collective Sustainable Darkroom (UK) and is also a member of the Filmwerkplaats film lab in Rotterdam.    

michaeladavidova.com/