Cut Outs & Rituals
Cut Outs & Rituals by Ulla Kudjoi
Harald Herlin Learning Centre 6-27.05.2019
This work is connected to the event of the artist’s mother losing her sight, the impact of which led her to research the act of sensing the world without the use of vision. Specifically, in the case of human blindness, Kudjoi’s work focuses on the formation of a supplementary sight through touch and the awareness of the body-in-motion, as guided by other senses.
The video tracks five women, moving through space. At time’s their bodies act as obstacles, interruptions, and sometimes, as shields and supports for one another. This research into the body in blindness also led the artist to reflect upon her own sight and the possibilities of training her vision, and what improvement is intended to mean in this process. The narrator explores and speculates upon what deeper and more attentive looking, when one uses great care to see, can bring forth.
Kudjoi’s work challenges the socially constructed hierarchies of the senses, which, increasingly privilege sight as the most trustworthy and necessary. In contrast to these assumptions, the work highlights how whole-body movement itself is inseparable from real-world navigation which continually requires multisensory interactions. By focusing on the body as a holistic instrument for perception, it reaffirms that our experience of space cannot be reduced to visual perception alone.
Indeed, Cut Outs & Rituals reminds us that discovering one’s sensory biases and training oneself to be sensitive to a multiplicity of external stimulus can lead to changes and developments over time in one’s sensory imaginaries. We can now ask ourselves, following Kudjoi, how can we harmoniously and care-fully reconnect with our surrounding along the lines of this sensory richness?
Ulla Kudjoi is a visual artist working with photography, video and text, and mainly interested in eye and perception. She finalized Master’s Programme in Photography at Aalto University in 2018 with her graduate project Cut Outs & Rituals. Kudjoi is also working as a photography teacher.
Curated by Bilge Hasdemir