What Escapes the Chisel in the Non-Ideal Classical Sensorium

Exhibition Details:

SALON/21

13 July – 31 August 2021

Photofusion, 6 Canterbury Crescent, London, SW9 7QD, UK

Celebrating its 30th anniversary, Photofusion’s SALON/21 marks a significant milestone in the institution’s ongoing commitment to contemporary photographic practice. Curated by respected selectors Emma Bowkett and Zelda Cheatle, and inaugurating the Glover Rayner Prize, this edition positions itself not merely as a retrospective of a turbulent period, but as a compelling investigation into the boundaries of photography as both medium and method.

At its core, SALON/21 reflects on a world in flux—one reshaped by rupture, reconnection, and reconfiguration. The selected works do not simply represent these shifts but interrogate them, navigating memory, identity, and spatial transformation through an array of deeply personal and formally innovative approaches.

Reframing the Material and Conceptual

Themes of boundary and transition are particularly acute in the contributions of Tamsin Green and Steve Pill. Green’s wall-mounted, deconstructed artist books merge photography with the languages of geology and archaeology. Each fold and fracture in her handmade forms challenges linear narrative, offering a tactile meditation on time and terrain. She invites the viewer to read space not as a continuum, but as an excavation—layered, broken, and resisting permanence.

Pill, by contrast, reorients the tradition of street photography. His hand-printed colour images, subtle in tone and emotionally charged, present the city as a layered emotional landscape—an urban space encoded with memory and quiet provocation. Rather than documenting, his lens maps psychic geographies, letting architecture dissolve into affect and shadow.

Memory, Ritual, and Intimacy

Personal history and cultural inheritance surface in the evocative works of Mathushaa Sagthidas and Hayleigh Longman. Sagthidas intertwines Sri Lankan familial rituals with archival photographs, constructing a narrative that shifts between remembrance and reimagination. Her compositions trace the diasporic pulse of memory—ritual as resistance, and the family archive as an evolving site of meaning. Through collage and layering, she offers not a nostalgic past but a spectral continuum.

Longman captures moments of post-pandemic catharsis: two brothers re-immersed in the natural world after prolonged isolation. Her lens dwells not on spectacle, but on tactile connection—mud on skin, breath in motion. Her images are quiet, grounded in sensation and recovery. Together, Sagthidas and Longman remind us that intimacy and resilience are forged not in grand gestures, but in the reweaving of the everyday.

Surface, Light, and Transformation

In the works of Mandy Williams and Jannine Smith, process and materiality become potent conceptual tools. Williams’ melancholic seascapes, printed on coloured acrylic, evoke weathered coastlines and the memory of forgotten shores. Their scratched surfaces, scarred and luminous, resemble relics of personal and environmental erosion. These are not mere images, but relics—charged with emotional sediment and chromatic ruin.

Smith’s tungsten-film photographs of petrol stations at night fuse artificial and ambient light into a singular exposure. Her images conjure a nocturnal stillness—industrial temples adrift in time, resonating with the silence of transitional spaces. The act of exposure becomes an alchemical ritual, transforming utilitarian structures into mysterious, liminal sanctuaries. Both artists remind us of photography’s physical dimension—its surface as a site of inscription, atmosphere, and loss.

Image © Batuhan Yardımcı

Reimagining the Image

Maria Ahmed and Batuhan Yardımcı bring to SALON/21 practices that blur the borders between photography, collage, painting, and installation. Ahmed’s work—spanning stills, motion, and handmade books—explores the unstable terrain between analogue and digital. Her dense, layered compositions repurpose found imagery, collapsing timelines into chaotic yet coherent visual fields. The result is a fractured cosmology of memory, where meaning must be pieced together by the viewer’s own associative logic. Time does not progress but spirals—each image a mnemonic echo.

Yardımcı, known for his painterly meditations on classical forms, brings a radically different intervention. Using altered photographic images of Greco-Roman sculpture as his base, he applies translucent oil glazes and mineral washes to disrupt, veil, and partially erase. The resulting surfaces are neither wholly image nor wholly painting, but something in between—a suspended state of visual unknowing. Fragments of stone architecture emerge only to dissolve again; limbs are obscured by gesture and darkness.

His approach confronts photography’s claims to permanence and clarity, replacing them with ambiguity and decay. Influenced by his Turkish heritage and informed by postcolonial critique, Yardımcı’s work positions antiquity not as heritage to be preserved but as a cultural construct to be deconstructed—softened by time, layered with erasure, and animated by contemporary questions of identity and representation. His process is one of psychic undoing: a return to the liminal, where statues speak in dust and myth collapses into mist.

SALON/21, in its alchemical mix of the conceptual and the corporeal, does not merely showcase contemporary photography—it transmutes it. The “non-ideal classical sensorium” invoked in the exhibition’s title gestures toward a breakdown of fixed forms and inherited canons. What escapes the chisel is not merely what remains unfinished—but what resists finishing altogether. It is the shimmer in the unresolved, the breath in the fracture, the sacred in the smear.

Photography here becomes less a medium of representation than a ritual of encounter—where surface, memory, and myth conspire to reveal something unstable, intimate, and vast.

 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.