Made without a camera and over extended periods Varga’s photographs embody a particular intersection of time and place, offering an autobiographical witnessing of the world, a memoire, rather than acts of representation. They exist as a result of two interrelated processes.
The first involves a duration of bodily actions, in which pieces of film are left to register performative gestures, or they underwent a haptic rendering where they are drawn on, handled, scratched, spat on and weathered. Exposed to light for long periods these pieces of film are processed and then printed in the darkroom to draw out the remaining traces. Realised at large scale they appear as abstractions but they are in fact distillations of the real.