Victoria Ahrens

Artist/Curator

Working with the notion of permanence and impermanence, instability and uncertainty, photographs, films and books of lost places become an allegory for the passage of time and the futility of small acts of survival. I am interested in the wonder of contemplation as a counterbalance to the certainty of science and look to archaeologies of place to tease out stories. I turn these topographies into abstracted or fragmented surfaces using traditional printmaking and digital photographic processes, film stills and projections, while retaining a sense of place in the image: waterfalls that move in reverse, film stills of mountains that allude to an otherworldliness. These experiments in print look to confront the imperfections of memory, and like typewriter ribbons that preserve an imprint of the stories written on them in their fibres, map the successive layers that erase and transform the landscape, generating a new narrative and collapsing past and present.
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07966283696

2016 PHD Practice/ Theory photographic printmaking, Birkbeck College, University of London (AHRC studentship award)
2013 Camberwell College of Art, M.A. Printmaking (Distinction)
2010 Birkbeck, University of London, M.A. Art History and Contemporary Theory (Distinction)
2006 B.A Fine Art, Central St. Martins, UAL
2003 Camberwell College of Art, Foundation Diploma in Art and Design
1995 Newhall College, Cambridge University, B.A/M.A. in Languages and Literature (1st class degree)

Exhibitions
2016
• Bodies of Water, Peltz Room Gallery, London, solo show, 1-23rd September 2016
• Royal Academy Summer Show, London 13th of June- 21st August 2016
• Contemporary Printmaking, Shanghai, China 7th July- 7th August 2016
• Arte Laguna Prize, Venice 18th March- 3rd April

2013-2015
• Intersecting Practice of Contemporary Printmaking in UK, IMPACT 9, Hangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai, China
• WAC Prize at Wells Museum, Somerset, selected by Richard Wentworth, Mariele Neudecker, and Donald Smith
• Anthology 2015, Charlie Smith Gallery, London (shortlisted)
• Form/ Fragment, West Yorkshire Print Workshop Gallery
• Micro Residency, Rio Carapachay, Tigre, Buenos Aires, Argentina- AHRC funded research and exhibition
• Liminal Dialogues: Landscape at the edges of memory and nostalgia, at Wimbeldon College of Art and Stockholm’s Kulturama College, Sweden
• Of the Earth at Plymouth Arts University, WALK ON exhibition at Peninsular Gallery, Plymouth
• NEO: Print Prize 2014 at Gallery 22, Bolton, UK
• Publish/Curate at TJ Boulting Gallery, London
• Corporeal Witnessing: the Portrait as Flesh, in The Skin of the Image, LCC Podium Lecture Theatre, London
• Honoré Project, Balzac’s Print Rooms, rue de Visconti, Paris...