Rozafa Elshan
(1 – 2 – 3) HIC HIC SALTA !
Luxembourg Photography Award Mentorship 2023

Exhibition: 24 February – 7 July 2024
Opening: Saturday, 24 February, 11 am

Exhibition organized in collaboration with Lët’z Arles a.s.b.l.

Today, let us take from our pocket a little piece of paper folded in two to find therein a few words of encouragement scribbled in pencil. – Approach the centre of the platform, position yourself dear guest and read aloud the invitation addressed to you.

HIC HIC SALTA! in 1 - 2 - 3 seconds; HERE NOW JUMP! on the platform set up upon the ground so that you may at last, weightless, exist in a brief present moment. Let us hush into this silence to rid ourselves of our dear personality and to create therein a poem.(1) Let us descend the rising current of all life in a single and unique inscription. The boards laid on the ground forming a horizontal invite to get as close as possible to things so as to experience, with the body, the event which, once secured, as soon escapes us.

At the scale of a tiny flake, leaning into the slope towards sensitive matter, it insists by shifting gesture upon a kind of verification. Let’s jump, let’s dance and slice this space-time so that we may populate and tighten the surface to which we cling. For the occasion of this exhibition and by means of a search through permanent passage, the guest empties once more their daily pockets so as to show to us their footholds upon this stage. By way of each leap, harried and constantly jostled, he passes the faces of a crowd to afterwards reject them outright (2). He would repeat this movement right to the bottom of the bag to weigh nothing in the end (3). Yet despite all efforts to strip away, something constantly looms in the palm of their hand.

In 1 - 2 - 3 seconds, we can try to situate this something by laying it down in the middle of the floor. Dvora’s laces, the sound of a thousand school bells or a handful of pits (4). As if we’d found ourselves in the midst of a field of celebration or a field of mourning, stricken by a peak or a trough, attempting to stop, grasp and retain, like a photographic prism, the present moment.

Now upon the high plateaus of this exhibition we may at last dance without closing our eyes. Today, on the contrary, if the guest could, they would become an all-seeing eye, so as to register, within, every detail of this perfect instant. Do they scream into the silence? No, they are breathtaken. Breathtaken by a life-changing something new. Smitten to the heart and paralyzed with emotion, they stand upon the stage, happy to have lived their whole life, happy to have suffered in their heart and above all in their body (5).

Here, it’s no longer a matter of knowing, but of living on the brink of all fields. Upon the count of 1 - 2 - 3 seconds, the deployment opens to show to what degree all can ceaselessly stop. Like a bird motionless in the sky, embodying in a single gesture statue and whirlwind (6), he would like to cancel everything (7) for a count of 1 - 2 - 3 seconds. — Now around the horizontal board, the attempt to string in a single motion a thread between earth and sky.

Fifteen images hung vertically that indicate, between silence and trepidation, the wake of a fleeting star. Floating and suspended, they bear witness, falling through pockets, the grating, the threshold, the stick, the box, the ball, the photograph, and the earth, to the best lit points of a shifting zone (8). Every time the guest decides to cut into the flux, we can follow their footsteps beneath which between Earth or Sky their fate plays out (9). In 1 - 2 - 3 seconds, they open then and there their hands and heart in full colour to just as soon empty these boards as the last to leave. To cancel everything so as to begin again to jump for joy and catastrophe.

As a conduit and by way of a stand-alone installation, Rozafa Elshan attempts to home in on a structure that constantly needs to be traced from a certain distance and depth. She is not free to build images from within an apparatus, but is constantly concerned with the conditions of a working process that have yet to take shape. By way of different grammatical and rhythmic orders, the work tends towards the manipulation of its own structures and insists upon experiencing, through the movement of the seeking-body, the possibilities, and limits, between the structure to be inscribed and the body to be laden, between the relationship to oneself and the relationship to the world.

All of this at a level of sensitivity that finds its fulcrum upon the ground zero of the everyday, our everyday landscape, where the image ripples forth from the experience of a shifting threshold that opens and unfolds the step. There resides in the present moment something insignificant and nameless that arises from the crossing of an interval to produce an imbalance, a crisis nearing the artist in motion.

What interests her is not the weight of things that obliges a turning around them, but the Circle in itself. A circle that is impossible to delineate, yet which must be drawn. Once it has been, it vanishes and one must just as soon start over (10). Within each context the installation acts like a new variation and constraint so as to loop the experience of the leap, the startle. As, according to her, the only way to touch upon a form of freedom and independence seems to be by roaming in motion that through which we hate to roam, motion being so painful (11). Given that motion so assails the rigidities, the certitudes and the values of the person who leaps to return to the shining thread.

Curated by Michèle Walerich

(1) Goethe, J. W., Zahme Xenien, III., C.H. textura, p.46.
(2) De Luca, E., Trois Chevaux, Gallimard, p. 52.
(3) Ibid., p.60.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Commengé, B., La danse de Nietzsche, Gallimard, p. 14-15.
(6) Didi-Huberman, G., La solitude des danseurs, Les Éditions de Minuit, p.97.
(7) Ibid., p. 114.
(8) Bergson, H., Réflexions sur le temps, l’espace et la vie, Payot, p. 40.
(9) Latour, B., Où suis-je ?, Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, p.114.
(10) Latour, B., Enquête sur les modes d’existence, La Découverte, p.342.
(11) Ibid., p.342.