Clepsydra
In 2020, an encounter with a waterfall began a series of explorations into the vulnerable materiality of photography and its relationship to time. Clepsidrae is part of this research initiated in 2020, and takes its name from an ancient Egyptian instrument used to measure time by observing a flow of water. Inspired by these clocks, I developed a process of decanting with cyanotype photographic emulsion. The work explores photography as a body vulnerable to time, presenting objects that transform according to the light conditions of their environment. Like any image, they expose the beauty of a fluctuating world, fossilised into an object, a human resistance to a world in constant change.
Juan Couder (Juan García Couder, b. 1998) is a Spanish studio based artist whose experimental practice moves around notions of authorship, temporality and materiality in the field of expanded photography. With a central concern in gaze as a form of knowledge, Juan plays with somewhat radical proposals as means to seek an embodied understanding of the world, built by process and relations of experience; while unpicking the photographic emphasis upon fixity.
Member of the Bioart Society since 2022, Couder graduated from EFTI, in Spain in 2019, and he completed his Master of Arts in Photography at Aalto University in 2023. Couder’s work has been presented internationally, including MoA 23 at the Finnish Museum of Photography, Plat(t)form 23 at Fotomuseum Winterthur, representing the image of the Helsinki Photomedia Conference 2024, “Contact of Models” and has been awarded by the Comunidad de Madrid in “Circuitos 2024”. Couder has recently participated in GlogauAir residency, and he presented the solo show “Winter Solstice: Exercises for a Clepsydra” at the Finnish Cultural Institute in Madrid.
Opening:
19.09.2025 | 19:30
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Thurdsay | 10:00–18:00
Friday | 12:00–20:00
Saturday–Sunday | 12:00–17:00
Gallery of Modern Art Leon Wyczółkowski District Museum in Bydgoszcz