Art Gallery 13, Bishop’s Stortford, United Kingdom
18 – 28 February 2023
Curated by Aleksandra Burkhanova-Khabadze

Rituals for an Unbordered Self presented a contemplative body of work by Varvara Dmitrieva, curated by Aleksandra Burkhanova-Khabadze. The exhibition explored how attention, perception, and identity are shaped—and constrained—by contemporary systems of visibility and speed. At its centre was a large-scale analogue photograph depicting a human figure fully engulfed in leaves, suspended between movement and stillness. What initially appeared pastoral gradually revealed itself as an image of resistance rather than retreat.

The exhibition continued Dmitrieva’s ongoing investigation into decolonial unlearning and material-based image making. Her practice, shaped by analogue darkroom processes, foregrounds slowness, physical labour, and the body’s relationship to time. Rather than producing images for rapid consumption, the works insisted on duration, asking viewers to slow down and inhabit the pace at which the image unfolds.

The vegetal and masked figures that appear throughout the exhibition resist legibility. They do not perform identity or offer narrative clarity; instead, they operate as provisional forms—bodies in transition, subjectivities in flux. The figures suggest a self that is assembled rather than inherited, porous rather than fixed, and shaped through encounter rather than definition. In this context, ritual is not presented as ceremony, but as a mode of attentiveness: a way of being present without mastery.

Material process played a crucial role in shaping the exhibition’s atmosphere. Working with large-scale analogue prints, Dmitrieva embraced the irregularities of exposure, grain, and chemical interaction. These traces of making were not corrected but preserved, reinforcing the image as a physical object marked by time and resistance. The darkroom functioned not only as a site of production, but as a space of reflection—where perception could be slowed, tested, and recalibrated.

The exhibition resisted explanatory frameworks. Rather than guiding interpretation, it allowed ambiguity to remain intact. Landscapes did not anchor the figures geographically, and gestures remained unresolved. This refusal of clarity became a central proposition of the work: that opacity can function as care, and that not everything must be revealed in order to be present.

Rituals for an Unbordered Self proposed an alternative relationship to looking—one that values hesitation over immediacy and attentiveness over extraction. The exhibition did not aim to resolve identity or meaning, but to hold open a space where subjectivity could remain unfinished, responsive, and unbordered.

Rituals for an Unbordered Self was presented at Art Gallery 13, Bishop’s Stortford, United Kingdom, from 18 to 28 February 2023.