Elvira Akzigitova

Artist's country of origin: Estonia

The photographic medium is capable of capturing radiant energies of the visible world, and an artist working with these elements is eminently interacting with forces unseen, seemingly, from outside of the realms of human perception. This is exactly what you feel as you peruse the work of the Estonian photographer Elvira Akzigitova. With enthusiasm and consistency she searches for a broader horizon of photographic vision. Her key subject is light, and she has learned to capture, balance, and reflect it, both to illuminate and to mold the photographs from light itself. Once the spectacle of outside events became insufficiently inspiring, she turned to the darkroom to witness an even wider variety of visual dramas on photographic emulsion. Alternative and abstract – inward looking images – Elvira decisively replaced the humanist documentary with a display of photographs presented as optical themes in themselves. Elvira generally shies from explaining her physical analog process of manifesting her images. She rarely rationalises about her intensions, or puts her designs into words, her fundamental longing is to prolong a little bit of her dream beyond the limits of reality. Overall, the artist claims to work better in the abyss of the unknown. The role of trusting experimentation in the darkroom is infinitely important to her, mixed with the skills and tools she has crafted herself. The artist is focused on using darkroom instruments that are sensitive enough to detect what one cannot see with the naked eye. Even though we are prone to face the risk of error in a dialogue with nature, we should let everyone see how surprised we often are at what we find. Elvira is akin to a child, experiencing it’s powerful earliest sensations associated with natural phenomena, with a feeling of primitive fear, excitement, a catharsis before the thunderstorm. A viewer of her work is met immediately with geomantic figures, cosmic dancing images full of movement and intent. They bubble with interpretation, and invite curious introspection. There is a dizzying effect, a perception that her works are possibly what empyrean life force looks like as it hits the limits of the big bang and repeats back on itself, causing what we feel to be the epochs. The images, however, are also aesthetic, charming and balanced. One could immediately lose one’s point of reference, and be sucked into the complicated beauty of her work, studying it with the same zest as scientists observed the wonders of nature with the first electron microscopes. This macro-micro aberration that occurs whilst perceiving the artist’s work is the key to its transmundane qualities and is the very essence of the vision of the philosopher’s stone.