“Contingency” is an exhibition by artist Meredith Davenport, currently in display at Tulla Cultural Center premises from April 20th to May 10th 2018. The photography mediums, collages and videos are the ones enabling the reflection of the artist’s ideas.
The ideas focus on the relationship between political and personal space in the Balkans and it s presented through landscapes, architectural images, and media coverage. This desire to reflect the Balkans does not happen casualy, it is the result of the artist’s travels in this region for 3 consecutive years during the summer season. The unvailed footages are from the artist’s personal camera , but not just. The snapshots published in the newspapers also came in handy in the collages created by the artist.
The denomination “Continegncy” – as an opportunity based on something uncertain depending on the fulfillment of a condition (curatorial text) – is embedded in almost every constituent part of the exhibition: despite human will and the footprint a human being consciously chooses to leave, occasionally there have been footprints that either were not foreseen or were ignored along the path of life.
The natural landscape is specially selected to appear insufficiently or vaguely in the exhibition. There are times when the natural landscape carries or not the highest importance; these images put face to face the work of nature with human interference.
The architectural element presented in the exhibition certainly does not aim for glory, on the contrary, it aims to convey newly built or demolished angles. It seems that the author’s goal is documenting reality without defining it from a spatial point of view or time aspect.
Meredith Davenport is an Associate Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and has taught photography classes at RIT in Kosovo. Her photos are also reflected in important magazines, often winning international awards. (https://www.meredithdavenport.com/)
