The Moving Eye Cannot See

The Moving Eye Cannot See
Dafna Talmor

Opening Reception: Friday 11th April 2025 | 6-8pm.

Sid Motion Gallery is delighted to present Dafna Talmor's second solo exhibition at the gallery 'The Moving Eye Cannot See', which includes new prints and sculptural works.

Dafna Talmor's second solo exhibition at Sid Motion Gallery, The Moving Eye Cannot See, builds upon her ongoing Constructed Landscapes series. It showcases two newly produced bodies of work that extend the artist's interest in fragmentation, abstraction, hybridity and reconfiguration. More broadly, Talmor's practice explores shifting conceptions of landscape and perspective and mechanisms of image construction and production.

The exhibition opens with an image of a set of islands, originally framed by the balcony windows of the domestic space Talmor stayed in during a private commission she undertook in 2022. Documented at various times of day from multiple angles, slivers of collaged negatives in stacked form seek to capture the complexity and vastness of the landscape in all its hues and variable weather. This new work, like all work in Talmor’s Constructed Landscapes series, is driven by the impossibility of conveying what the naked eye scans expansively when encountering a landscape. By reconfiguring her negatives, Talmor conflates multiple views and temporalities, alluding to the enormity of an all-encompassing first-hand experience of a landscape.

Beyond abstracted representations of landscapes, the commissioned work mirrors proportions of windows that contain spectacular views. Architectural and mathematical details generally rendered inconsequential, become integral to the way the work is literally formed and shaped. These relational decisions are extended further throughout the exhibition bridging time and space both within and beyond the frame. One set of framed work informs the dimensions of the next in a chain of interconnectedness and internalised systems of logic.

Extending the dialogue with architecture, the exhibition includes a multi-panelled site-specific photographic sculpture made in reference to the window panes of the main gallery space. In this case, proportions are relative to the dimensions of the 5x4 enlarger Talmor uses in her London darkroom. Photography has often – and problematically – been described as a window to the world. The window as a portal or a metaphor for another dimension, that frames or limits the view, seems more fitting here.

Images are mediated by external factors – the landscape, the house, the darkroom and the gallery each play their role. Rotations, repetition and shifts in scale invoke a rhythm, inviting viewers to move in, out and around the work. Shifting forms, stuttering lines breaking and reappearing, paradoxically suggest tectonic movement despite their embodied stillness. 

In Talmor’s work, practical and conceptual considerations often coalesce. A hand-built “master” negative is constructed from fragments of up to 29 different source negatives, leading to multiple outcomes. Each image made of collaged negatives expands over time as a set of unique preparatory studies. Doubling as test prints that enable Talmor to see how each image evolves, the studies reveal their edges and the obsessive numbering logged by hand which correlate to the source negatives used in the construction of each image. Once Talmor is content with the composition, the final study becomes the “master” print. Reasserting the multifarious personalities inherent to photography, it is consequently printed and framed as a cropped large-scale iteration or re-fragmented into multi-panelled editions.

In Constructed Landscapes: Addendum, Talmor’s 2020 monograph (designed by Hans Gremmen and published by Fw:Books), served as a catalyst to produce new work that relies on the repurposing and reimagining of redundant source material, a process integral to her practice. Activated through recurring actions performed in the colour darkroom, it extends Talmor’s exploration of voids and negative spaces. Through multiple transitions and reproductions, colour photograms made with collaged book sheets of the monograph, render the original source material — and its connotations — invisible while retaining its indexical trace. By oscillating between negatives and positives Talmor seeks to playfully blur the often-rigid boundaries and reductive relationship imposed on traditional photographic practices. Through this process, a cycle of mechanical reproduction is instigated, eventually coming full circle. The material loops back into book form culminating in a second collaboration with Fw:Books, due to be published in May. Like all the work in the Constructed Landscapes series, analogue glitches and the materiality of the process come to the fore; traces of light leak out to form flares and so-called imperfections — a consequence of the hardware and optics of the darkroom—simultaneously enabling the artist's hand to become more visible.

Ahead of the upcoming solo exhibition we are excited to launch a special edition by Dafna Talmor from her Constructed Landscapes (Vol. III) series.

Special Edition of 50 + 5 AP
Edition 1-25: £100 + postage
Edition 26-50: £150 + postage
AP: £200 + postage

Contact the gallery to reserve a Special Edition

Artist Biography

Dafna Talmor is a London-based artist and lecturer whose practice encompasses photography, sculpture, spatial interventions and collaborations. Her work is included in public collections such as the National Trust, Victoria & Albert Museum, Deutsche Bank, Hiscox and publications such as The Women Who Changed Photography (2024), 100 Photographs: From the Collections of the National Trust (2024), Look at This If You Love Great Photography (2021), Post-Photography:The Artist with a Camera (2014), Architectural Review, The Guardian, FT Weekend Magazine, American Suburb X, 1000 Words, Elephant Magazine, Camera Austria and ArtReview. Constructed Landscapes, her first monograph published by Fw:Books in 2020, was longlisted for the 2021 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award.  

Recent exhibitions include Glossaries, a duo show with artist Hannah Hughes, Sid Motion Gallery (London), solo shows Sea of Stones, House of Arts – Veszprém, following the completion of the Balaton-Eye artist residency, Veszprém-Balaton European Capital of Culture programme, Constructed Landscapes, Carmen Araujo Arte (Caracas) and group shows The Hunter of Thyself, Versus Art Project x Ka (Istanbul), Known & Strange: Photographs from the Collection, V&A Museum (London), Stories We Live With - Selection from the Somlói–Spengler Collection, QContemporary (Budapest) and Occupying Photography: To the Milky Way via the Sea, NŌUA (Bodø). 

Talmor is the recipient of a Royal Photographic Society Honorary Fellowship and the featured artist in How Was it Made? The Chromogenic Process, a film by Zuketa Productions, commissioned by the V&A Museum.

Constructed Landscapes: Addendum, a short run publication (and second collaboration with Fw:Books) coinciding with The Moving Eye Cannot See, will be released in May 2025.

View a short film of Dafna Talmor walking through her studio in East London offering an insight into her photographic process and the making of her Constructed Landscapes series ahead of her solo presentation at Photo London 2021. Film by Andy King.