Walking on Fumes at Liste 2026
Post-Fair Notes on Artistic Tendencies
A Conversation with Eva Chapkin
Dislocation
Eva Chapkin photographs herself the way others keep a journal—obsessively, tenderly, and with the awareness that the act of inscription is already a form of survival. Born in Chișinău in 2003, raised in Tiraspol, Transnistria, and subsequently relocated—through Bulgarian citizenship, through Constanța, through Bucharest—Chapkin has spent her entire conscious life arriving somewhere and preparing to leave again. As a result, Dislocation, her current show at Arsmonitor in Bucharest, Romania, curated by Lina Țărmure, does not attempt to resolve that condition—on the contrary. It amplifies it, and in doing so, turns instability into a visual language precise enough to be read by anyone who has ever been between places, between selves, between languages.
Black-and-white pictures in matte black frames in various shapes and sizes. Manually edited color Polaroids. Photo transfers onto seemingly nostalgic plates. At the center of Chapkin’s practice is the camera. In her hands, it becomes a prosthetic for belonging—a way of pressing one’s image into the walls of rooms one is about to vacate, of insisting on presence precisely where presence feels most precarious. Her body appears in these photographs not as subject or spectacle, but as what curator Lina Țărmure calls an index of instability: a surface onto which political history, geographic displacement, and intimate memory are simultaneously inscribed.
Assembled as a montage—an accumulation of obsessions rather than a sequence of revelations—Dislocation draws on the Warburgian logic of the image as a mnemonic archive, in which no picture belongs entirely to the moment of its making. Chapkin herself writes in verse and short prose, and her texts inhabit the same territory as her photographs: a world in which objects are animate. What is striking is how little this resembles the language of trauma, and how much it resembles the language of attachment.
Julien Delagrange: You grew up in Tiraspol, in a region that is officially part of no country. How does that particular kind of geographic ambiguity—being from a place that doesn’t quite exist on the map—shape the way you understand identity, and the way you understand photography?
Eva Chapkin: I believe it’s the only place where I do exist. The only place where the moment I pass the border, I am who I am, I can finally feel my arms, I can finally feel my lungs expand from the moment the car picks up a rhythm back home, I know that I am present. I feel like the places where I am considered present alter my perception of identity, with each home or space I move my body, it reeks of thoughts to preserve. From corporal memory to encompassing myself as a phantom limb, a prosthetic memory. Through imitation, we learn. Through observing, we react. Through reacting, we exist.
JD: From this perspective, could you briefly discuss the title of the show, Dislocation? And what is the role of dislocation throughout your artistic practice in general?
EC: Dislocation doesn’t follow the idea of displacement, more like a fracture, a dislocated shoulder, which we tend to get from time to time. It’s care, but also frustration, that you cannot move properly; you cannot pick up the cup you like in the morning, just because this ‘limitation’ is stopping you. From reinterpreting what is familiar to your ghostly new being, how do you step into your so-called new ‘home’? Where do you leave your belongings? You’re just like a guest: unaware of your surroundings, shy, unable to move, so as not to disturb the home. My artistic practice is filled with observation and shame. The four walls don’t invite me in; they observe because the longer you’re gone, the more you vanish, and the more the pavement there doesn’t grasp onto your shoes.
JD: The title Dislocation names a condition, but the work seems to enact its own kind of counter-movement — a compulsive return, a repetition. What is the image, or the gesture, or the situation you find yourself returning to most obsessively, and do you understand why?
EC: The more you repeat your own image, the quicker it vanishes. The repetition in gestures and situations is just an obsessive thought of disappearing. Instead of the idea of preserving a space, mummifying it, I need to disappear. Following me on a continuous road is the question, “How many more times can I repeat this till I’m no more?” It has no relation to disappearance resulting in death, but more to forgetting. Forgetting how I look, how I walk, how my eyes are unsymmetrical, how I breathe. It’s a reincarnation I cannot quit; if I do, I am no more. Its two polar opposite ideas that churn me like minced meat.
JD: Let’s begin with a series of works I personally really enjoy. In A Dog’s Life, My Life (1-7) (2026), you present a series of photographs in irregularly shaped frames rendered in an almost raw, matte black, similar to the sculpture of Ronald Bladen, for instance. Could you speak to those formal decisions and what role do these frames play in relation to the images themselves—do they contain, interrupt, or extend what is happening inside them?
EC: The images in those frames are performative instances. When I mentioned corporal memory, I meant how I usually remember a space. Instead of remembering in images, I remember through movement. I remember the way I lie in bed, the way my arm bends when I move towards the kitchen. The images are made in the place where I feel most present, Tiraspol. By reinterpreting movements and actions performed there, I selfishly keep it for myself; I do not want to be known, and I do not want you, as a viewer, to know me. The frames contain the images; they turn the space into an abstract container. The walls, actions, even the furniture may be familiar to you; it affects you, it remembers you, but that’s all that remains a speculative thought. In my artistic practice, I want the viewer to see and perceive the subject in the image as a first encounter. Eva is not the one you’re looking at; it’s someone you remember.
JD: Interestingly, for a photographer, your work contains an atypical material curiosity, which is not only reflected in the A Dog’s Life, My Life series, but also, for instance, in the interventions on your Polaroids, or in the transfer of your images onto plates in this show. Could you expand on this important notion within your practice?
EC: Everything starts with a photograph, with an instinct. Material curiosity is usually embedded in how we view images displaced from their natural four corners. A photograph for me has the same role as a room. When I am in a room, how do I connect more to it? I bash myself against them, trying to understand why they are so harshly different, because maybe if I am engulfed by them, I will be contained. To take this structurally, my interventions on polaroids focus on the disappearing image; I never make anything that lasts long. It can be preserved and cared for, but the image is fragile.
The materials that find their way into the image are a foundation; they serve as a role to embody it and make it present. It’s how I get close to them, the moment I am able to intervene, to touch, to remember the smell and the rigidity of the object, it leads to the idea that I’m full of folds with a nesting grave, full of ulcers, full of kids, full of fetuses, full of eggs. The image never stands alone; it continuously changes. It continuously changes its purpose. I may look back at some images taken three years ago and crave the need to touch, smell, destroy, or, once again, make their nest a new home.
JD: The curatorial text describes your use of your own body as a ‘space of negotiation between belonging and estrangement.’ When did you first understand that your body—rather than, say, the places you pass through—was the real subject of your work?
EC: I think it was the very first moment I became aware, the moment I stuck my nose to the mirror in the hallway and felt it touch itself rather than glass. The moment the material world made sense, the moment it became real. Although that’s the last time I felt my body, now it morphed to trying to feel it once more. Day to day, I float; I don’t walk. Turning it into the real subject is by trying to make sure that I exist, that the space around me, the spaces I photograph myself in, know me and remember me. Everything around me exists and has emotions, from the doors I close aggressively to the walls I pet when the geometric shape I created with my elbow scares them. To me, the negotiation and estrangement diffuse my body to a shape, an irregular shape, we do not find an angle, but an open space of discourse.
JD: The self-portrait has historically been understood as an act of self-possession—a claim over one’s own likeness. In your case, given the constant displacement, does that act feel genuine, or does it carry an element of irony, even desperation?
EC: The self-portrait is an act of desperation, a shameful act of my presence. It’s a desperate act to remember. Although the moment I remember, I prefer to distance myself from identifying the subject and look at it as if I’ve never seen this person before. I don’t want to possess myself, I want to forget myself completely. I think the irony would have a place in the act itself, a hypocritical allegory to the idea that I want to disappear, but I still need proof that I existed. I want it to be genuine; it’s the only way this act can be for me.
JD: You write in parallel with your visual practice—verse, short prose—and apparently many of your images begin from those writings. Could you describe that relationship? Does the writing precede the photograph, does the photograph precede the writing, or is it more entangled than that?
EC: I think in words. Images are letters, a vocabulary created on the basis of these texts. When I begin photographing, it appears in phrases; I am a shape of a letter, my body contorts into a verse, not its meaning, but the fluidity of it. In writing, I try to be as visual as I can. I remember, in phrases, it’s not the image of the leafy shadow on the white walls that takes me back to a moment in time, but the words I was thinking at the time. I would say my visual practice is entangled; they can’t live without each other, they are codependent, they will perish like widowed doves.
JD: If photography is, for you, a practice of permanent presence—a refusal to disappear—then what happens to the images that don’t make it into an exhibition? Are there photographs that are too private to show, or photographs you have actively destroyed?
EC: There are photographs I’m scared to show. It’s not because they’re private or intimate; on the contrary, I’m scared I will be seen, I’m scared I will not be in control. There are times when I actively destroy photographs, but not because of the subject, but because of the emotions I feel in that moment. I live through my works, that’s me if you notice it on a wall, in a frame, on a plate, if you wave, I will wave right back at you, and yet there are some I do not want to open. For some, I think it’s not their time to exist at the moment. I keep them stored, stacked, and when it’s their time, they can turn to me and say, “I am.” I believe in the mutual agreement between my photographs and me, mutually assured patience. There are works I give privately to someone, and there they remain and will remain.
JD: To conclude, Dislocation also includes video—among which the title On the White Walls of My Dream House intrigues me particularly. Could you tell us more about the works on view and how differently or similarly you approach moving images compared to your photographic practice?
EC: To be honest, I never thought my main visual practice medium would be photography. For a very long time, I wanted to sit and delve into moving images; stillness scared me. I always wanted to run until, for a moment, I thought the photographic practice itself was a moving image, or how I started practicing it. It still has a time frame. I place my finger on the self timer, I run to my position, the place of gestures, and I pose, then review. Now I don’t differentiate them as I did before; to me, they have turned into a whole. On the other hand, if separated from me, the moving image stands alone, private, intimate. The photographs need my hands to turn into that. On the White Walls of My Dream House came after a conversation; it was named after being seen, it was the presence that gave it its identity as a moving image. In these video works, I try to find stillness in flickers, from pixels to the subject blinking, the moving image personifies a photograph.
Last Updated on June 10, 2026
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About the author:
Julien Delagrange (b. 1994, BE) is an art historian, contemporary artist, and the director of CAI and CAI Gallery. Previously, Delagrange has worked for the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, the Jan Vercruysse Foundation, and the Ghent University Library. His artistic practice and written art criticism are strongly intertwined, examining contemporary art in search of new perspectives in the art world.
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