Observe the life moving like a river around you, and realise that the images you make may become part of the collective history of the time that you are living in'. 

– Eli Reed

Have A Butchers is pleased to present The Lore, an exhibition bringing together four artists who conjure fantasy worlds suspended between history and fiction: Greta Ilieva, Giulia Parlato, Kasia Wozniak and Tereza Zelenková. Revolving around the ways we preserve memory, they draw inspiration from the past to reflect on the present, using photography to examine the nature of storytelling.

Multitudinous and nonlinear, the past is a peculiar place, and the tales we weave from it become intricate tapestries of the factual and the fabled, the personal and the collective. Mythology, literature, scientific archives and museums have attempted to shape and make sense of our world and document its happenings from the beginning. Then, with the advent of photography, another way of telling stories emerged: a transformative one of endless possibilities, with the power to give form to the imaginary and the real, often dissolving any distinction between the two.

The four contemporary, female artists in The Lore each explore the limits of photography itself, while also exposing time and memory as fragmentary, complex constructions. Through the alchemy of image-making, in allegorical and staged scenes, they bring history closer, illuminating elements both found and fabricated in their individual ways.

In Parlato’s series, the artist examines the parts photography and museums play in shaping our understanding of history by creating her own, fictional museum in front of the lens. Combining forgeries and uncategorised objects unearthed from museum archives with items of her own making, Parlato creates simulated dioramas that appear completely lifelike, undermining our belief in the versions of history that are sold to us. For Zelenková, meanwhile, history is a place to travel into, and she uses her camera to crystallise parts of it that resonate for her on a personal level. From Freud’s study to Bataille’s grave, her images are a visual feast of period aesthetics. Silent and often free of movement or presence, they possess a feeling of timelessness that runs beneath all of the work in this exhibition.

Looking back at the past is a constant theme throughout The Lore, with spectres of the 19th Century – the century that gave us photography – inhabiting all of the work. For some, this dialogue takes place primarily through technique, with both Ilieva and Woziak employing traditional processes to bring their images into being. Specialising in the wet plate collodion process – a method that emerged in Victorian England – Wozniak assembles organic, collected objects in her studio and elevates them into figurative and sentimental future artefacts through sodium and silver. Elsewhere, Ilieva’s delicate close-ups of horses, hand printed in her darkroom, offer a similar tactility and softness. Like traces of recent memories, they echo photo archives from centuries long gone.

At the heart of every culture you will find stories, and within those stories you will find symbols of the people and cultures that formed them. In this way, our recollections shift and evolve with the passage of time, passed through generations, and metamorphosing into new visions. Individually, all of The Lore’s artists are visual storytellers of our time, engaging with photography not only to reflect on reality but to build on it too, quietly observing our world, unearthing scenes of wonder from within it. Together, their images take on new meaning, and as in cinema, literature and theatre, this exhibition offers a doorway into an imaginative world, uncannily like our own. A dreamlike space, this show invites the viewer to consider the parts of their own histories that might become lore someday; and something of the collective future that awaits us all too. 

Joanna Cresswell