Eva Chapkin (b. 2003) was born in Chișinău, grew up in Tiraspol, Transnistria, received Bulgarian citizenship through her maternal line, and subsequently moved to Romania — first to Constanța, then to Bucharest, where she completed her undergraduate studies at the National University of Arts. The artist’s biographical trajectory, marked by successive transitions between geographies, languages, and identities, constitutes not merely the context but the very raw material of her artistic practice.

Working with photography, Eva Chapkin obsessively returns to the image of her own body as a space of negotiation between belonging and estrangement. The frontal approach to her own representation is part of a continuous reconstruction of the self, creating subjects out of backgrounds — more precisely, out of the places she passes through. In this sense, the image, for Eva Chapkin, is a personal mnemosyne: a Warburgian montage of an obscure and intimate micro-history, a mnemonic journal of permanent displacements. This transitive condition and this way of being in the world are simultaneously a means of expression and of inquiry. Photography thus acquires the function of a witness to emotional geographies, inverting the trauma of dislocation by imprinting the spaces that temporarily shelter her with her own image. In her works, the body assumes the role of index of instability — of social and political context — subject to the same forces of change and resettlement that describe the condition of a figure always caught between borders and cultures.

Under the auspices of an identity constituted through a series of processes opposed to the fixing of a personal and social self — through destabilization, transition, and affective contamination — the exhibition Dislocation proposes a reading of photography as a practice of permanent presence: a way of remaining in contact with oneself and with one’s own experience, precisely in those moments when that experience becomes most difficult to hold in place. At the same time, the exhibition moves beyond the thematic frame in the classical sense, and beyond narrative linearity. It functions instead as a montage — an accumulation of obsessions, recurrences, and fragments — that describes Eva Chapkin’s practice over recent years. The series of works brought together in the exhibition capture the way the artist operates with her own body in relation to the environments, situations, and objects toward which she carries a form of affectivity.

For Eva Chapkin, the image of the body exceeds the social stakes. She does not seek to clarify, obscure, or fetishize the image of woman or her role in different circumstances. The evident stake is a poetic one — existential, psychological, and ultimately profoundly human in nature. The body becomes both presence and trace, and photography is a space in which identity is continuously negotiated. The self-portrait here plays a role of self-recovery — a gesture of mastery over one’s own body, but also a fragile attempt to fix something that is in continuous motion. In a traditional sense, the self-portrait bears witness to the era in which its author lives. In the present exhibition, it is foregrounded within frames that operate through a montage of times, in an anachronistic direction, in keeping with the ideas of Georges Didi-Huberman. Didi-Huberman argues that the image never belongs entirely to its own present but is traversed simultaneously by multiple temporal layers.

In each image we find the date the film was made, the history of the place — whether buildings, apartments, or urban symbols — the period of Eva’s inhabitation of that space, as well as the moment of return and the recollection of those experiences. Eva Chapkin’s photographs thus exceed the documentary function of a single moment in time and a single location in space, the body itself becoming a composite and anachronistic archive of displacement.

Through several collaborations with Eva Chapkin, I came to understand that her relationships with objects and domestic spaces belong to the realm of affectivity. This relationship extends into the texts the artist writes in parallel with her visual practice. Often, images begin from writings in the form of verse or short prose. The narrative voice frequently identifies with that of animals, objects, or domestic things — revealing perhaps one of the most symptomatic aspects of her practice: the subject searching for its object and vice versa, the being seeking to become one with the things around it, while objects are personified, vulnerable, alive.

Perhaps in this continuous exchange of roles — between body and objects, between image and text, between presence and disappearance, between the familiar and the foreign — the title Dislocation simultaneously illuminates both the condition of leaving a place and the visceral need for fixity and anchorage.

— Eva Chapkin