From 2 to 5 March, Indra Gallery in London hosted NEITHER / NOR: The Intimate Geography of Contradictions, a group exhibition organised by the Centre for Arts, Research and Culture (CARC) in collaboration with the Nina Miller Collection. Curated by Michaëla Hadji-Minaglou and Alina Khalitova, the project set works from a historical collection alongside those of emerging contemporary artists, among them Varvara Dmitrieva.
True to CARC’s research-led programming, the exhibition was built on encounter rather than chronology. It placed contemporary practices next to works already established within art history, inviting the two to speak to one another across the room. A selection of lithographs by the German artist Paul Wunderlich, active in the second half of the twentieth century, provided the historical foundation, his figurative imagery and symbolic intensity offering a visual vocabulary that the newer works could answer. Paintings by Aline Gaiad, oscillating between the figurative and the dreamlike, added a further contemporary layer.
The curatorial premise treated contradiction as a productive force. Rather than framing opposites as mutually exclusive, the exhibition explored the intermediate positions artists occupy between abstraction and figuration, visibility and concealment. That terrain is a natural fit for Dmitrieva, whose analogue photographic practice has consistently worked in exactly those in-between spaces. Her masked and effigy-like figures refuse easy legibility, and her commitment to the slow materiality of the darkroom resists the clarity and speed of contemporary image culture. In the context of NEITHER / NOR, her concerns with concealment, opacity, and identity held between categories sat squarely within the exhibition’s central question.
She appeared alongside a group of contemporary artists including Aksinia Kupriianova, Elena Magerramova, Lola Alimova, Valeriy Iakovlev, Viktoria Sokolova, and Zibeyda Seyidova, with Wunderlich and Gaiad anchoring the historical and painterly ends of the conversation. Several of the contemporary participants approached the show’s themes through investigations of form and material, and the curators arranged the works to encourage viewers to move back and forth between them, discovering relationships across different approaches rather than following a single narrative line.
For CARC, the project marked another step in its ongoing effort to create platforms where emerging artists are presented alongside historically significant works, generating fresh perspectives on both. For Dmitrieva, a London showing within a research-driven, internationally minded curatorial frame extends a trajectory that already spans Venice, Cyprus, the Netherlands, and France, and places her practice in direct dialogue with the kind of UK institutional context her recent work has increasingly engaged.
NEITHER / NOR: The Intimate Geography of Contradictions was on view at Indra Gallery, 20 East Road, Old Street, London, from 2 to 5 March.
