In-Between Narratives
In this exhibition, Marija Timofejeva and Robin Slater Christensen approach transformation not as rupture, but as a continuous and often imperceptible condition — one that unfolds across landscape, body, and identity.
Timofejeva’s paintings treat the landscape not as representation, but as a psychological terrain. Her works carry a quiet longing: for memories never formed, for moments that never occurred, for a sense of belonging that remains just out of reach. These environments feel at once familiar and distant, returning repeatedly to a place that never fully held you. Within them, human figures appear as vulnerable, almost animal-like presences — naked, waiting, searching for fragments of innocence. Set against a nature that is older and more enduring, they exist without hierarchy or judgment, suspended in atmospheres of silence and passing time.
Artificial streetlights occasionally cut through muted greys, while elsewhere soft natural light prevails, creating a tension between the constructed and the given. In this contrast, human thought appears fragile. Anxiety may feel overwhelming, yet beside trees and sky it becomes temporary, diminished. Nature does not respond; it simply remains. By removing sexualisation and moral burden from the naked body, Timofejeva frames innocence as a condition prior to social awareness. Clothing becomes a symbol of consciousness — of norms, culture, and visibility — while the unclothed figure exists outside these constraints. Here, closeness is not found in dialogue, but in the steady presence of the nonhuman: if connection falters, the land endures; if memory fades, it is the landscape that remembers.
Christensen’s work, by contrast, approaches transformation through the notion of the portal — not as spectacle, but as subtle shifts in perception, where identity becomes momentarily visible to itself and begins to change. Transformation is not exceptional, but constant. Their practice focuses on these quiet processes, particularly in relation to gender as something ongoing, unstable, and unevenly recognised. For those historically marginalised, such transformations are often constrained, leading to the formation of self-constructed spaces — “islands” of autonomy shaped as much by exclusion as by self-determination.
Drawing on references such as the intimate interiority of Celia Paul, the speculative thinking of Paul B. Preciado, and the temporal fluidity of Orlando, Christensen constructs environments of transition. Bedrooms, sculptural elements, transparent surfaces, and figures become sites where identity is continually reorganised through the interaction of subject, object, and space. Within this framework, autobiography functions not as a fixed narrative, but as a method for rethinking marginalised experience — moving beyond linear time and stable coordinates. The self emerges instead in flux, formed in the spaces between.
Together, these practices propose environments in which transformation is neither resolved nor complete. Whether through the stillness of landscape or the shifting thresholds of identity, both artists locate meaning in states of suspension — where longing, perception, and becoming remain open, unresolved, and ongoing.
