Laura Bivolaru

They call the Romanian 'transition' the period between December 1989, with its violent days of the Revolution, and January 2007, when Romania joined the European Union. I call 'transition' my childhood, a time-space flowing unhurriedly towards 'a better life', 'true Capitalism' and 'original democracy'. Family photographs from this period are rescanned, resized, reimagined. Photography as factual description becomes thinking through images.

On film, photographs are separated by tiny spaces of unexposed surface. The camera mechanism denies the potential to be images of these gaps. When printed in the darkroom or scanned, they reveal a granular, black space. In Laura's work, this photographic interstice resembles the 'Third Space' of transition. A site of hybridity between a despised past and an ideal future, transition already has embedded in itself the form towards which it slowly moves, but also the frustration that this form cannot be attained in the present. Therefore, the perception of time shifts from a flow to a dragging present, creating the illusion that nations are trapped in history. Transferred from the margins to the centre, the black gap seemingly absorbs the photographic space and collapses the linearity of time.