Based on 16,000 portraits taken on glass plates by a studio photographer from Hungary between 1905 and 1935, Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm explore the relationship between photography and the moving image and the different temporalities that they produce.
"In photography, I can never deny that the thing was there. Past and present are superimposed… The photo is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body which was there proceed radiations that come to touch me, I who am here. The duration of the transmission doesn’t matter. The photo of the departed being comes to touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”* Their work Night Bodies. Night Lights was launched at midnight as an immersive “thumb cinema”—an experimental cinema format especially made to be experienced on a smartphone in a private space—in the attempt to recreate an attention of a shared theatrical space. Night Bodies. Night Lights. is the first stage of their research.
*Excerpt from a conversation about Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, in Derrida, Jacques & Stiegler, Bernard. (2002). Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews., p. 113
The iteration of their performance Night Bodies. Night Lights was presented with the kind permission of József Attila Muzeum of Makó, Hungary at Ecology of Attention #4: stand out of our light.
Andreas Bolm is a filmmaker and artist living and working between Germany, Hungary, and France. His films portray people in their social and familial environments, examining the fine line between documentary and fiction. His films have been screened at many festivals worldwide, including Festival de Cannes, Berlinale, and at MoMA New York.
Boglárka Börcsök is an artist and performer based in Berlin and Budapest. She works at the crossroads between dance, choreography, film, video, and voice work. Her works are based on personal encounters, forgotten artists, unseen power narratives explored through documentary, fiction, archival approaches, and choreographic methods and practices of embodiment.
As a performer, she has worked with several artists internationally. Previous projects include performances and exhibitions with Eszter Salamon, Ligia Lewis, Kate McIntosh, Tino Seghal, Boris Charmatz, and Joachim Koester, which have been presented in theaters, galleries, and museums worldwide.
Since 2018, Börcsök and Bolm have collaborated together on the documentary film The Art of Movement and on the performance-installation Figuring Age.