Multi-layered pigment prints on aluminum panels cite the materiality of the daguerreotype, that early photographic process of the 19th century in which light inscribes itself directly into metal. Yet in Vall’s digital image production, surfaces are not singularly marked by light—rather, digital processes simulate its trace. The basis of the works are motifs generated from found images and subsequently edited by hand. Evocative underwater worlds (“past tense”), natural phenomena (“brainwave dreampattern”), shadows of invented apparatuses (“gray dog (vibrant)”), or collections of knowledge (“future tense”) challenge established expectations of photographic image-making processes. At the same time, they embody photography’s progressive, often quasi-scientific urge to constantly test new techniques. It’s an appropriation through imitation that Vall consistently pursues in her work.

“new gravvvvity” is the title of the exhibition and becomes programmatic in its repetitions and intentional glitches: the interferences in these works—double exposures, fades, stamp patterns, irregularities and blurs—ask not what an image depicts, but rather what it generates—how it loads, renders, or prints. The works are not witnesses to the “having-been-there” (as Roland Barthes termed it); time manifests itself in the image process—as a construct between subjective experience and technical production. Many of the works are set in aluminum profiles, those standardized system components that remain recognizable as mass-produced industrial parts—and yet function in the exhibition as framing, as ornament, as space-occupying structure. This simultaneity of disclosure and auratization runs through the artist’s entire practice, including the modular sculptures “vvvvertigo,” “ssssensitivity,” and “blind eye (gray star)”; these works imitate optical effects and adopt the role of teaching objects in their demonstrative function.

In the “capsule” works, Vall uses found photographs from a second-hand store in Williamsburg, which she samples, dissects, and restages. Private photographs without context, whose worlds we imagine, supplement, and project from gaps. Magnifying lenses enlarge and focus image sections while simultaneously distorting them and reflecting back the surrounding space. In “The Miracle of Analogy: or, The History of Photography” (2015), Kaja Silverman writes that “photography’s truth is disclosive, rather than evidentiary”—photography does not make visible what was, but is rather “development, instead of fixity.” The images are memory pieces of a fictional past that, according to Vall, “lie grammatically in the future perfect”—partial satirical crystal balls revealing something photography will have brought into being.

In a time when deepfake processes, AI generation, and image manipulations blur the boundaries between “authentic” and generated images, Tatjana Vall’s works become a poetic assault on the real. The exhibition interrogates our positioning between the inscrutability of apparatus-based image production and the nostalgic longing for authenticity that we attribute to images. “new gravvvvity” reveals that we have always already been imagining, supplementing, generating—between the having-been-there and the will-have-been-there.