Masha Pryven

Between going and staying

2020

Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause. 

by Octavio Paz
(translated by Eliot Weinberger)

Masha Pryven used that poem instead of a description of a photographs series by the group exhibition “One Swallow Does Not Make a Summer”, which was on display October 22-25, 2020 at the GlogauAir Gallery, Berlin.
That series was titled “Between going and staying” and was about the ephemeral distance between now and then, about the melancholic nature of time and remembrance of things past. All photos were shot in 2020 in Brittany (Bretagne), where the author visited places one find in the book by Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time.

Ewa Maria Slaska, administrator:

1. You can buy the pictures. Just write a comment and don’t forget to write your mail.
   I have that one with an armchair. It is an authentic Proust’s armchair in a house of Aunt Leonie in Combray (Illier)
2. Till 23rd of Mai you can visit an Antiquariat in Immanuelkirchstraße 6, 10405 Berlin, for an exhibition with another photos by Masha