(capsules) is a series of temporary installations that take over vacant shop windows, bringing contemporary art proposals to unexpected corners of the city and opening up urban spaces to contemporary creation 24/7.
(capsules) benefits from the generous support of the City of Luxembourg.
Marta Djourina
States of Motion
Location
6-8, rue Jean Origer
L-2269 Luxembourg
States of Motion is a site-specific installation investigating photography as a process of movement, tracking, and spatial recording. Expanding my ongoing artistic research with analogue photography, direct light exposure, and sculptural image-making, the project explores how bodily movement, duration, light, and environmental conditions become active agents in the production of the image.
The installation is composed of large-scale analogue photographic works suspended in layered formations within the exhibition space. Produced without the use of a conventional camera, the works are created through performative movements in the darkroom by exposing photographic material directly to light, gesture, motion, and physical contact. Walking repeatedly from side to side of large sheets of analogue photographic paper in complete darkness during the exposure process, I create unique photographic surfaces that register trajectories rather than representations. Fine traces, folds, scratches, accumulations of light, and physical marks remain visible as recordings of movement and time.
Using lasers, self-built light tools, colored filters, and programmed light sources, I “paint”directly with light onto the photosensitive material. The colors emerge through long analogue exposure processes in which moving light sources leave behind layered traces, gradients, and chromatic shifts. Rather than depicting external subjects, the works are generated through the direct interaction between light, movement, chemistry, and the body in space. Each image becomes the result of a performative act in which light functions simultaneously as medium, drawing tool, and recording device.
Installed within the storefront windows, the suspended translucent elements create shifting visual relations between image, architecture, reflection, and public space. The installation changes continuously depending on daylight, street reflections, and the position of the viewer. As pedestrians move past the windows, they repeat the same lateral movements through which the works themselves were created. The viewer’s body becomes part of the perceptual process, activating continuously changing viewpoints and layered visual overlaps.
The project proposes two possible installation formats depending on the dimensions and spatial configuration of the allocated Capsule.
The first version consists exclusively of the suspended large-scale photographic works. In this configuration, the translucent hanging elements form a layered spatial environment visiblefrom the street both during daytime and at night. The installation functions as a porous visual structure in which passing bodies, reflections, and surrounding urban activity become integrated into the work itself.
The second version expands the installation through the inclusion of the two-channel video work Frame of Time together with suspended plexiglass sculptures. The video tracesrepeated walks through urban space using self-built panoramic pinhole cameras during extended periods in Glasgow and New York. Rather than documenting travel as spectacle, the work reflects on movement as a continuous condition of artistic existence shaped by transit, temporary working environments, exhibitions, and displacement.
The suspended plexiglass elements extend the idea of trajectory into three-dimensional space. Their forms are derived from tracked walking movements and recorded spatial paths developed while moving through the city. Acting simultaneously as sculptural drawings, tracking lines, and reflective surfaces, they interact with the projected image, storefront glass, and surrounding urban light conditions.
Across both installation formats, States of Motion approaches photography not as a static image but as a material and spatial process of recording. Light, movement, reflection, and bodily presence remain physically embedded within the work, while the storefront itself operates as both exhibition architecture and perceptual device. The installation transforms the public window into a site of continuous movement in which trajectories of artist, image, architecture, and passerby intersect and unfold over time.
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