About the exhibition: The Mechanics of a Metaphor (Enxhi Mandija) is a collection of prose poems and a series of paintings documented as photographs. The work is concerned with the permanence of material and memory, the effects of cultural displacement, and a consideration of art-making as an inherited, familial practice. Paying attention to moments of resonance, transmission and transference, the collection attends to the tension between different languages and mediums colliding and collapsing into one another.

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What is Normal (Libertad Ansola, Vicente Ansola) is a dialogue between photography and flash fiction where imagination and dreams take on a leading role in showing the strangeness of the ordinary world. This project dares the viewer to change their way of looking, to find beauty in the bizarre, and to break free from what is expected in a world where what’s normal is the rule. The creative power of the combined arts and the ambiguity hopefully encourage the viewer’s free interpretation. It is they who have the last word.

 

Libertad Ansola is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Aberdeen, recipient of the the LLMVC New King’s studentship, and shortlisted author Aesthetica Magazine 2022. Vicente Ansola is a professional photographer with more than 40 years in the profession. Landscape category winner Sony World Photography Award 2022, Hasselblad Master 2012, and portrait of the year Kodak European World Award 1996 are some of his achievements. Since 2020 What is Normal has been showcased in several museums and art galleries in Spain: Sala Ruas, Cantabria; As Casas do Retratista, Galicia; and Museo de la Ciudad, Madrid.

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Enxhi Mandija is an artist and writer based in Aberdeen. She holds an MLitt in Art Writing from the Glasgow School of Art, and an MA from the University of Aberdeen in English-History of Art. She was the winner of the 2020 Literary Lights Creative Writing Prize, held by the Grassic Gibbon Centre and the University of Aberdeen, and her writing has appeared on MAP Magazine, SPAM Zine, The Yellow Paper, The List, and The Elphinstone Review amongst others. She works as Assistant Curator at Peacock & the worm.