When lockdown descended across the globe in March 2020, Autograph's curatorial team Mark Sealy, Renée Mussai and Bindi Vora started conversations with our community of artists, about how to respond to the crisis. This dialogue coalesced into our commissioning project Care | Contagion | Community — Self & Other, with Autograph supporting ten UK-based artists to create new work exploring the wider context of the Covid-19 crisis.
Silvia Rosi responded to the project by building a life-size room, the set for her series Neither Could Exist Alone (2020), expressing the isolation, boredom, and fear experienced during the beginning of lockdown. For each artist's work, Autograph also invited a writer to contextualise the commission in a short essay. Here, Krasimira Butseva considers forms of isolation in Rosi's new photographs and film.
Krasimira Butseva is a Bulgarian-born and London-based writer, researcher and educator. She has previously written for eep magazine, The Calvert Journal and Art Licks. Butseva has previously presented her academic research in the conference 'Truth, Reality and Imagination Interpretations from Eastern and Central Europe' at University College London, and is to participate later in 2021 in the conference '(Counter-)Archive: Memorial Practices of the Soviet Underground' in Technische Universitat Dresden, Germany and in the 10th World Congress of Central and Eastern European Studies in Montréal, Canada. Butseva is also an associate lecturer at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.
You can follow Butseva on Instagram and Twitter, and see more on her website.
See the full artist commission by Silvia Rosi
Read an interview with the artist and Autograph's Bindi Vora
Renée Mussai introduces the new artist commissions in a curatorial essay One (Pandemic) Year On...
Read the introduction to the Care | Contagion | Community project
Visit the Care | Contagion | Community — Self & Other exhibition at Autograph's gallery
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Autograph is a place to see things differently. Since 1988, we have championed photography that explores issues of race, identity, representation, human rights and social justice, sharing how photographs reflect lived experiences and shape our understanding of ourselves and others.
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