Tatjana Vall Explores Image Formation Through Sculptural Systems and Historical Techniques

Tatjana Vall's artistic practice investigates image production as a dynamic process shaped by technical apparatuses, material dependencies, and viewer participation. Operating across sculpture, installation, and media archaeology, she creates spatially distributed systems where images are continuously generated rather than statically displayed. Central to her work is the concept of Bildgebungsverfahren (image formation processes), translated into sculptural terms using digital imaging, early photographic methods, mechanical systems, and infrastructural elements like light and water. Vall frequently dismantles or reconstructs apparatuses to reveal their operational logic while rendering them poetic. Her installations often function as developmental chambers where images are produced, mediated, and transformed in real time. A significant aspect of her research involves nineteenth-century image technologies, particularly daguerreotype processes, which she examines not nostalgically but as formative moments where technical image production intersected with democratic structures, authorship questions, and institutional control. Vall rejects linear technological progress narratives, instead proposing recursive temporalities where past and present image regimes reflect each other. Her technical approach emphasizes simplicity, exposing basic mechanisms like motors, pumps, and lights to make dependencies visible. She positions herself as a non-scientist translator rather than expert, using self-taught knowledge to reconfigure scientific and archival materials into poetic structures. Recent large-scale installations create ecological relationships where visitor participation activates interdependent systems involving light, water, and biological elements. Alongside installations, Vall produces constructed images using found, scanned, or digitally sourced materials, layering them to emphasize process over indexicality. Her material vocabulary includes aluminum profiles, silk, stone, and printed surfaces, with aluminum representing modular industrial contexts and silk introducing chromatic intensity through textile printing techniques. Vall's work ultimately explores the relational dynamics between images, apparatuses, and bodies, inviting viewers to reconsider how images emerge through historical, technological, and collective processes.