Opening, November 25, 2025, 6 pm
Exhibition, November 26, 2025 – January 16, 2026
“Photography” in essence means “drawing with light.” Chemical substances, optical processes, and storage media are needed in order to obtain a permanent image from something as immaterial as light. Moreover, the production of photographs often requires complex equipment. The demand for such images, in turn, is owed to a multitude of socio-economic reasons. Mara Novak employs photographic techniques to create images that reflect the conditions of their making. Sometimes this happens quite literally: for example, she revisits methods from the early days of photography, such as pinhole cameras, to capture her studio or exhibition spaces and translate them into a photographic process. This media-reflexive approach is also evident in Novak’s appropriation of commercial stock photos, which she embeds into real contexts to provoke breaks in perception. In other works, she explores dichotomies between (digital) images and (social) spaces.
For Kunstraum Lakeside, Mara Novak will develop a new series of works that interprets the annual theme of Glitch not as a malfunction of an apparatus but in human perception. The artist draws on the phenomenon of the optical magnification of objects under water to link natural distortions and illusions to the climate crisis. Her exhibition Aquatic Perspectives: Dialogues over a Drink (working title) addresses glacial melting, biodiversity depletion, and cognitive dissonance in view of anthropogenic global warming, without raising a wagging finger. The question is whether our prevailing economic system might rather be a glitch in the planetary order.
Mara Novak (b. 1987 in Austria) lives and works in Vienna.
www.maranovak.com
