An Uncertain Vision

The artist Helena Civit will present her project “An Uncertain Vision” on September 5th, after being selected to receive the Homesession Invited grant, as part of a collaboration with La Escocesa.

Opening: September 5-7, 6-9 pm
Closing: September 8, 12-3 pm

Wax tablets were a widespread medium for writing throughout classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, and even more sporadically until just a few centuries ago. A thin layer of beeswax, sometimes pigmented with charcoal, was spread on a small wooden board, or often on two boards joined together in the form of a diptych. Writing was done by inscribing into this surface with a sharp tool called a stylus, the back end of which was usually flattened to erase the marks and reuse the tablet. Thus, wax served as a soft, flexible, and portable medium for swiftly noting and erasing, capturing successive thoughts and data not meant for millennial memory.

An Uncertain Vision gravitates around this waxy, viscous, vulnerable surface. The pouring of the liquid in sheets articulates a way of working. Gradually, the substance containing signs overflows, leaves behind its rigid support, and barely holds itself together.

Sticky materials that stain, cover, or impregnate: beeswax or its whitish counterpart, paraffin wax, gum arabic, rosin, graphite, bitumen, charcoal; in different genealogies, these are vehicles for signs and traces. Here, they flow and solidify without taking on this significant charge. The inscription that does not materialize tensions the mute surface only as latent potential. Silence is sustained.

The tabula rasa, however, does not emerge as such—instead, the stillness reveals faint murmurs, sediment of time, accumulated marks from successive processes. They appeal to a sensitive approach, to an archaeological curiosity, to listening, and to touch.

Helena Civit Kopeinig (Villach, Austria, 1997) is a visual and multidisciplinary artist. With a background rooted in Fine Arts (UB, 2019), editorial design (Escola Massana, 2021), photography, and pictorial languages, her current practice unfolds perceptions around the image, visual creation, and the culture of visibility, immersing them in the languages of the tactile and material. She observes, both in workshop processes and everyday habits, the back-and-forth dialogue between body, gaze, object, and tool, and is interested in the idea of exchanging and complicating their roles and logics.