Each Apparition, Searches for an Eye

Ames Yavuz presents Each Apparition, Searches for an Eye, featuring a new body of work by Stanislava Pinchuk. The series comprises 100 photo-portraits of soldiers from Pinchuk's deployment as Official War Artist of Australia in 2023, documenting combat training for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Instructed to obscure all identifying features to prevent enemy facial-recognition software, the artist manually manipulated the film negatives to blur the faces of her subjects. The works are presented as passport photo-size images framed within steel plates, gesturing towards the critical shift of what a 'war portrait' may mean in the 21st Century. Acts of facial erasure paradoxically allow Pinchuk's photo-portraits to enter into a public record. In the iconoclastic process of blurring, the artist speaks of committing each face to her own memory. The partly-erased photo-portraits recall 19th Century 'spirit photography', in which daguerreotypists experimented with emergent long-exposure technology.