Audience includes 15 portraits of people in a particular moment of insight. Yana is looking for a crack in the daily routine, an extraordinary vulnerability. Unlike her previous portrait project (Terminal, 2019), featuring people alone in a frame (and, somehow, alone in the world) here, in “the audience”, they are together.
The faces we see in the photographs are of people, who are deep in thought and all present together. They are experiencing a common moment, a phenomenon, an event that is invisible and that brings them together in a silent way. Their portraits are windows into the elusive reality of spiritual experience, and the photograph serves as a kind of brush with which the artist paints absence.
Whether Yana Lozeva’s language will take us back to the faint images of religious experience or remind us of the dimension of spirituality is not really of great importance. The photographs do not attempt to document or manipulate reality, and are certainly far from conceptualising it. It is in this lack of intention, of purpose, of a desire to persuade, where their value lies. They are pictures of shared intimacy that is completely self-sufficient and that presents to us the very idea of the human spirit in a powerful and convincing way.
Vladya Mihaylova, curator
