The Slow Violence of Attention within Post-Digital Aesthetic Experience

In Rituals for an Unbordered Self, curated with lucid restraint by Aleksandra Burkhanova-Khabadze, Varvara Dmitrieva continues her rigorous dismantling of the perceptual regimes that structure contemporary life. The exhibition’s central image—a figure engulfed entirely in leaves, suspended between movement and stillness—becomes a site where the politics of attention unfold with unusual force. At first the work appears to offer a pastoral gesture; yet its quiet is not innocence but resistance.

Over the past several years Dmitrieva has developed a conceptual vocabulary grounded in decolonial unlearning and analogue materiality. Her formation at Photofusion in London, where she also participated in the influential Salon/21 exhibition, deepened her engagement with the darkroom as both technical process and philosophical condition. Earlier training at the School of Young Artist at PRO ARTE in St Petersburg provided the foundations for a practice attuned to cultural fracture, opacity, and forms of ritual that endure beyond official narratives. Across her work, masks, effigies, and vegetal bodies become engines for rethinking what subjectivity can endure, shed, or transform.

The theoretical stakes of this exhibition resonate closely with Hito Steyerl’s account of “the poor image’s vulnerability under the violence of circulation”. Yet Dmitrieva’s photographs offer neither poverty nor abundance; they occupy a space prior to that divide. Her analogue prints are not merely resistant to digital acceleration—they articulate an altogether different epistemological rhythm. Printed at a scale rarely attempted within contemporary analogue practice, they bear the marks of manual exposure, uneven absorption, and chemical negotiation. The grain carries phenomenological depth rather than aesthetic nostalgia: the viewer senses the duration embedded in their making.

This is not technique as craft; it is technique as worldview. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s proposition that perception is always embodied gains renewed force here. Dmitrieva’s photographic process is inseparable from her central question: how does a body perceive when it has been trained to see too quickly? In her hands, analogue printing becomes a counter-technology. It unravels the algorithmic tempo of the present and asserts that attention itself is a material—one with limits, elasticity, and wounds.

Burkhanova-Khabadze identifies this precisely. As she writes in the exhibition text:“Varvara does not ask the viewer to understand the image; she asks them to inhabit the pace at which the image becomes.”This is not contemplation for its own sake; it is an interrogation of the systems—digital, imperial, disciplinary—that have normalised a state of perpetual perceptual exhaustion.

What unfolds in Rituals for an Unbordered Self is not a series of photographs arranged for interpretation but an experiment in the conditions under which subjectivity becomes thinkable at all. Dmitrieva’s masked and vegetal beings do not offer themselves for reading; they interrupt the visual economy that demands clarity, recognition, and immediate meaning. Instead of functioning as identities, they articulate identity’s dissolution—its drift, permeability, and capacity to form through encounter rather than lineage. The self emerges not as inheritance but as assemblage: an accumulation of transient materials and gestures.

Her analogue methodology intensifies this proposition. The darkroom is not merely a site of production; it is a philosophical engine. Each print carries the friction of its making—the resistance of light through emulsion, the slowness of chemical transformation, the subtle unevenness that mechanical standardisation would erase. This slowness forms a structural argument. Against the frictionless circulation of digital images, Dmitrieva positions the analogue print as a space where time condenses, thickens, and becomes perceptible again. It restores attention as a practice rather than a reflex.

This approach resonates with Byung-Chul Han’s critique of hypervisibility, where the demand for transparency becomes a mechanism of control. Dmitrieva’s masked figures reclaim opacity not as evasion but as a condition for ethical relation. They remind us that the other should not be fully knowable, that mystery is not an aesthetic flourish but a necessary structure of coexistence. Their refusal of facial legibility becomes a form of sovereignty—a reclaiming of the right to remain partially untranslatable.

The works also echo Christina Sharpe’s proposition that certain histories endure not in archival clarity but in atmospheric residue—in what hovers, circulates, and recurs without resolution. Dmitrieva’s figures draw their shape from such residues: beings formed by histories that never solidified, by futures that have yet to cohere. Their indeterminacy is not obscurity; it is survival.

Burkhanova-Khabadze’s curatorial acuity lies in allowing this indeterminacy to remain intact. She does not frame the works with explanatory narratives or ethnographic cues; she permits them to exist as questions, as propositions for how ritual might function outside ceremonial structure. As she notes:“These works do not illustrate ritual; they generate the conditions in which ritual becomes thinkable again.” Ritual becomes attentiveness, opacity, hesitation—a mode of perception that cares for what it cannot fully grasp.

The “slow violence of attention” invoked in the article’s title is not metaphorical. It names the psychic abrasion inflicted when perception is forced to operate at digital velocity. Dmitrieva counters this harm not by offering serenity but by constructing an image-world that refuses acceleration. Her figures demand duration, patience, the relinquishing of mastery. In doing so, they offer a mode of perceptual repair—tentative, incomplete, but profoundly necessary.

In Rituals for an Unbordered Self, nothing resolves. The figure never reveals itself. The landscape never stabilises. The ritual—if it is a ritual—remains without script. Yet this unresolved state is the exhibition’s clearest articulation. Dmitrieva proposes that to live unbordered is not to expand infinitely, but to relinquish the demand for fixity. It is to inhabit a self porous, provisional, attentive—a self capable of refusing the speed that harms it.

The exhibition remains on view at Art Gallery 13, 5 Ducketts Wharf, South Street, Bishop’s Stortford, CM23 3AR, from 18 to 28 February 2023, inviting visitors to encounter a practice that restores depth, hesitation, and slowness to the act of looking.

 Tom Denman, residing in London, is a distinguished freelance art critic whose perceptive articles have featured in eminent publications such as Art Journal, ART PAPERS, ArtReview, Art Monthly, Burlington Contemporary, e-flux, Flash Art, Ocula, and Studio International. He earned his PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading, focusing his research on Caravaggio and the noble-intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Naples. Presently, his critiques primarily explore the subtleties and emerging trends within contemporary art.