Nora Adwan

Apparent Translucencies

Nora Adwan has created objects for her photographs, which appear to be stylized human forms. Lamp shades form glass heads with round openings like straining open mouths. The small porcelain ears could complete the image, but the heads are missing their eyes. Transparent tubes reference the torso. Dark hair, which should be outside, has grown inwards into the glass spheres, where it is more suggested than really seen. Daylight breaks over the ornamental surface of the lamp glass’s curves and corners. The surface of the spheres is structured so that the inward gaze is limited causing the outer and inner to melt together.

The work can be understood as a reflection of the human senses, central to which is seeing, but a sight that can’t penetrate and understand what is seen. It leaves open questions because by its nature the human eye is limited in its faculties. A person cannot understand the world through looking alone

Generally, glass separates rooms and objects from one another, while leaving the possibility of recognizing what has been separated from a distance. A glance though a window fixes itself upon an existing world. Both the glass spheres and the window panes in the photographs are only apparently see through. The outside world is blurred and only recognizable with effort. The photos are full of uncertain blurring with focus only on the objects; another reflection on seeing. Inside and outside are blended together through the different layers of transparency in the glass, which partly allows light to pass through it while rejecting the efforts of the eye to penetrate the interior. Albertis famous metaphor of the image as a window on the world, as a gazing out of the self is reversed here by becoming a gaze into an unfathomable inner.

Jana Kühn
Contact Nora Adwan; 07763234653 for the exhibition duration or

noraadwan@hotmail.com