Sara Rman: Keep the Form Burning

In the exhibition Keep the Form Burning, Sara Rman continues her artistic practice of dialogue with materials that resist permanence: photographic C-prints, polystyrene, glass, resin and stone. In her oeuvre, these materials are not just carriers but active agents — burnt, melted, imprinted, and transformed. Through processes derived from the medium of photography, the artist transforms them into something new that requires careful consideration. The exhibition therefore unfolds in a slightly dreamlike atmosphere, in which the depicted places and transformed objects act as material imprints of reality.

At the heart of the exhibition is a new series of sculptural photographs, The Path I Walk On (2025), each capturing a different microcosm of a single place—the riverbank where the artist has been returning since childhood. We see swirls of water, glistening light and dried clay on rock walls. The photographs are printed on viscose, draped over the depicted stones and fixed with polymer resin. These hybrid forms create a kind of geological memory of their own – a relationship between the real place and the created form. The series is complemented by a light installation in which stones from the same place are thermoformed in polystyrene plastic. The original image disappears – only the form and the light remain.

In Echoes of Presence (2024) and Drainform (2025), the artist’s dialogue with materials continues through the transformation of found fragments. In the first case, burnt pieces of glass, stone remnants and traces of images are enclosed in layers of polymer resin. Drainform is a cast of a calcareous sewage wastewater formation found under a motorway overpass. This bizarre, luminous mass, encased in transparent resin, emphasises the duality between the natural and the artificial. In these works, too, the materials are transformed into new forms, removed from their originals.

The author’s formal approach in the exhibition remains clear: photography is not just a reflection of reality but a space for intervention, a process of creation and the physical body itself. The title Keep the Form Burning embodies the key principle of her artistic practice: material transformation, in which the initial form is never fixed but changes and is preserved through interventions. Through this flow of material change, Sara Rman creates forms as a record of time, elements and her own presence. It is not an act of destruction but of transformation — a process through which matter enters a new, parallel material reality.

Špela Pipan

Sara Rman (1992, Ljubljana) is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of photography and craftsmanship. Fascinated by boundaries, she seeks to reach, transcend, and blend them through process-driven approach. She avoids a formalistic view of photography, instead questioning its indexical nature and alternative functions beyond image-making.

Thanks to: KELA, Blaž, Ksenija in Egon