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Archiving the Horizon

Group Exhibition
Nadya Kotova Gallery w/ TENZU
Antwerp
2026

Exhibition text

The work of the artist examines the friction between human connection and the records that survive it. It considers not just the physical kilometres between geographical points, but also the unseen structures of thought and emotion within a person, and the subtle space between a body and the evidence it leaves
behind. Within this framework, family archives cease to be static repositories of facts; instead, they become living, chemical battlegrounds where memory actively resists, decays, and mutates.

This restlessness is a hereditary echo. The artist's grandfather, an aeronautical engineer, spent a lifetime in flight and quantified the earth from afar. He collected coordinates and built archives of the countries he traversed, often preferring the accuracy of a map to the proximity of home. In pursuing the horizon, he mapped vast distances, yet in doing so, he left his own family as fragile, unmapped territory.

To enter this territory, the artist deploys fine silver leaf as a central material vocabulary. In The Unsaid (2026), a series transforming the artist’s grandmother’s passport portraits into individual postage stamps, the correspondence is permanently interrupted by a silver leaf “Killer” mark, a 1967 postal cancellation.

Here, the silver acts as a terminal strike, physically solidifying the void and ensuring the message remains permanently unsaid. This material bridging continues in In Transit (2026), where three Baryta prints of fuchsia-red, chemically faded family slides are overlaid with silver leaf coordinates, tracing a technical path from the grandfather’s oﬃce in Murcia to the artist's current studio by the Antwerp airport.

In the new works presented for this exhibition, the mechanical and mathematical rigidity of the grandfather's archive is subverted into poetry, vulnerability, and active physical decay. In Where Do They Go, The Airplanes We Never Take? (2026), the distant, aerial worldview of the engineer is literally folded into the fragile form of six paper planes made from vellum archival prints. While their gilded silver fronts blind the viewer, their backs reveal the image overlapped by its own structural folds. Left unvarnished, the silver is exposed to the elements, destined to tarnish over time, a direct manifestation of the shifting, unstable nature of memory.

This subversion of technical detachment deepens in NC-130B (TA-CAM-O) (2026). The artwork features an image of an aircraft from the archive, a project the grandfather was directly involved in. Layering this archival photograph with hand-applied fine silver lettering, the artist weaponises the specialised aeronautical engineering systems he spent his life building to map internal terrain. The text charts the operational acronyms of his career: TACAMO ("Take Charge And Move Out"), a military airborne relay designed to maintain unbreakable communications lines during nuclear warfare, and Boundary Layer Control (B.L.C.), a high-lift technique used to prevent air from detaching from a wing to avert a catastrophic aerodynamic stall. Transformed from cold, professional milestones into an emotional lifeline, these terms reveal a profound psychological parallel, a technical bridge built across a psychic stall, exposing a mechanical obsession with preventing separation.

Where the historical archive attempts to preserve, the artist allows time to run its course. In Portraits (2023), a series documenting an abandoned family photo album erased by time and neglect, we confront a vacuum where human subjects once resided, leaving only mould and water stains. Conversely, in All Redacted Except You (2026), the artist actively engineers this vacuum. Documenting a cold, bureaucratic gathering of mid-century oﬃcials, every face is redacted with fine silver leaf except for one: the grandfather, transforming an act of preservation into an inevitable surrender to time and obscuration.

The exhibition culminates in the landscape series The Places I Have Never Been (2026), composed of photographs taken by the grandfather himself. Printed on Hahnemühle paper, the fine silver leaf is no longer a geometric coordinate or a clean line of text; it flows organically across stone fountains, rushing water, and a quiet, dreamy scene of the grandfather himself sleeping in a forest clearing. By meticulously gilding only the highlights and areas of exposure, the artist literally covers the light of the photographs with metal. As these textures tarnish over time, the illuminated portions of the image will slowly fade into absolute black. The series becomes a living erosion, a final admission that despite every map drawn, every flight logged, and every portrait preserved, the true essence of the other remains a beautiful, unbridgeable territory that eventually surrenders to the dark.

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