Szilvia Bolla’s art started with abstract anti-photographs on the depression of overproduction and overconsumption of images, and eventually moved on to post-photography on depression itself.
Just as depression is both individual and social, biological and political, Running Up that Hill approaches the aesthetic and social dimensions of depression, which is becoming increasingly systemic in our depressive economic-ideological system, through a personal and transgenerational lens.
Visual-sonic installations reconstructing concrete and symbolic spaces of memory, ‘pharmaco-kinetic’ sculptures depicting bodies deformed by bio- and psycho-politics, ‘neurograms’ based on the analogy of skin and photography, are assembled into a deprecatory and mourning-political programme that transforms powerlessness into a counter-power.
Bolla’s experiments with materials and problems of form, previously embedded in a fundamentally photo-ontological and photo-critical context, which challenge the dichotomy of ‘visible and invisible, material and immaterial, and living and dead’, become problem-forms in the exhibition, forming links from Kate Bush to Walter Benjamin, from the critique of the pharmaceutical industry to capitalist realism, from psychopharmacology to Art Nouveau and from black metal to material feminism.