Diana Pankova

In her project Silent Dialogue, Diana Pankova turns her gaze onto the machinery of the event venue, the Aalborg University Create campus building. Usually buzzing with student life, the building suddenly became silent during the lockdown, revealing the usually hidden level of its existence to the attentive observer. Pankova establishes a dialogue with the giant machine of the university campus, looking through the eyes of ‘simple machines’: pinhole cameras. Based on the ancient principle of the camera obscura, a pinhole camera obtains images by letting light through a tiny hole without the use of lenses. Silent Dialogue explores questions of simplicity and complexity, the role of intuition and control, the division between art and science, the criteria of beauty, and the technological mediation of human life. Playing with scale, space and time, Diana’s cameras capture a variety of alternative views on the same place. The resulting images become a silent answer from the side of the building to the artist. By bringing these images back to the space they reflect, Pankova hopes to bring perceptual insights to other observers, extending her interaction with the architecture into a spiral.

Diana Pankova is an alumna of the Media Arts Cultures Joint Master Program at Danube University Krems (Austria), Aalborg University (Denmark), University of Łódź (Poland) and LaSalle College of Arts (Singapore). Also a graduate of the Belarusian State University in Minsk. Philosopher and photographer. In her visual search she works with varied types of cameras and techniques, and experiments with time, space, shape, scale and connections in between. Her favourite artistic companions are diverse pinhole cameras. Participant in many photographic exhibitions around the world. Instructor of pinhole workshops. Diana’s academic research revolves around the existential and sensory experience of interacting with art, from the perspective of the artist, the “viewer” and other possible sides. At the moment her interests especially focus on multi-sensory (synesthetic) experiences of immersive interactive art and their relation to communication. She is also interested in curation of art and art mediation.