Lonely characters populate the works of Clara Jozefine Morks (b.1995), who creates narratives about love, absence and intimacy. With a strong interest in the performative, she uses photography and video to create the conditions for her psychological dramas to unfold: scenes soaked in melancholy that nod to pop culture and sci-fi.

Feelings of claustrophobia spill out of her works, the camara moving up close to her subjects, as in her black and white portraits of friends in the bathtub and other intimate situations. In her explorations of relationships and incommunicability, which play with the familiar and the unfamiliar, intimacy is desired but always tainted by a sense of uncanniness; the longing for closeness is inseparable from the horror of witnessing the collapse between self and other. In her narratives, couples spiral into endless discussions in which gestures are repeated on loop until meaning is eventually eroded.

                           Surrealism and psychoanalysis are important references for Morks, who uses language as a system of metaphor. This leans towards an interpretation of reality led by unconscious and sensual forces, rather than by the rule of the intellect. There is much in her work that evades rational readings: a residue or emotional afterimage of sorts, similar to the feeling of a clear dream dissolving upon waking. Sleeping and waking characters recur in her stories, as she investigates the tension between what is above and below the surface of visibility and communicability.

– Francesca Astesani