SELF-MADE — Emma Fisher & Polly O’Flynn

13–18 NOV 2025 . SELF-MADE

Numa Sala presents “SELF-MADE”, a two-part performance and exhibition by Emma Fisher and Polly O’Flynn.

The project examines our relationship with presence, attention and the impulse to capture everything. It invites the viewer to stand, stay, observe — to allow something live to unfold before them — while simultaneously confronting the urge to record it, to hold onto it, to turn a moment into something permanent.

Inspired by the writings of Susan Sontag, SELF-MADE questions why we seem to need our “reality confirmed and experience intensified through photographs.” In an age of constant documentation, the exhibition explores the “image-junkie” inside each of us and the cultural cycle of mental overload we continuously contribute to — and asks, to what end?

Exhibition Overview

“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography

At the heart of the exhibition is a live performance by contemporary dancer Emma Fisher. Moving across large sheets of paper, Fisher leaves traces created by a light-sensitive solution applied to her body. Each performance results in a series of unique prints — the captured residue of movement — exposed and displayed in the gallery shortly after each intervention.

These imprints do not simply document a gesture; they become tangible records of a moment shared between the performer and the audience. In contrast, the photographs and videos taken on personal devices may appear secondary — flattened, incomplete, or even rendered pointless beside the physical traces created in real time.

Themes

Presence versus documentation
The addiction to image-making
Reality, perception and memory
Performance as trace
The tension between ephemerality and permanence

About the Artists

Emma Fisher and Polly O’Flynn collaborate to merge performance, visual art and conceptual research. Their work reflects on perception, identity and the psychology of viewing.