For Lisa Jahovic, time is material

As Soft Interruptions concludes at Flowers Gallery in London, Lisa Jahovic sits down with hube to discuss the visual language that defines her practice. Whether working on a fashion campaign or preparing a gallery exhibition, Jahovic’s photography tests the limits of truth within the photographic image. The lens is poised in anticipation of disobedience; something is not quite right. The only truth is that nothing is ever truly certain. Such an unrestrained surrender to one’s instincts requires a certain kind of bravery, a quality Jahovic possesses in abundance. She savours the coalescence of tenderness and awkwardness, and the act of leaving problems unsolved. For Jahovic, the unexpected is the focus.

hube: After visiting your recent exhibition, Soft Interruptions, at Flowers Gallery on Cork Street in London, something that stayed with us was the sense of tension that permeates the show. Each image seems to flirt with dualities: hard and soft, inertia and action, form and function. The viewer is often held in limbo by these subversive visual collisions of opposites. How do you conceive of these collisions? What draws you to moments of in-betweenness or liminality?

Lisa Jahovic: I’m drawn to those moments because they feel the most truthful. Life rarely exists in absolutes; it’s usually somewhere in between.

The collisions in Soft Interruptions consider the quiet instabilities of contemporary life. I’m interested in the gap between how things are meant to function and how they’re actually experienced. We inherit systems and roles that promise stability, but in reality they often involve constant negotiation. I’m not interested in resolving those oppositions. In fact, I think the work depends on them remaining unresolved. If something is both humorous and unsettling, awkward and tender all at once, it’s much closer to how we experience the world. Those liminal moments are where objects become most alive, and where the everyday reveals itself to be far stranger and more poetic than we usually allow ourselves to notice.

h: It could be said that there is something scientific about your approach: setting up a physics experiment with variables, tests, and equipment; an analysis of physical properties and material relationships. Yet this precision is often undercut by a tongue-in-cheek naivety, bold playfulness, wry inaccuracy, harmless errors, or what might be considered an ‘unfair test’. What role do mistakes and errors play in your creative process? How would you define an ‘error’? Is there such a thing? And what does it mean in the context of your practice?

LJ: I like that reading, because there is something genuinely experimental about the way I work. Although my practice is often rooted in conceptual questions, ideas are often tested through making. The studio becomes a space for thinking materially. It can feel a little like setting up an experiment, but I’m not trying to prove a hypothesis. I’m interested in creating the conditions for something unexpected to emerge—something I couldn’t have arrived at through thinking alone. The physical behaviour of materials, gravity and chance all become collaborators in the process. Because of that, I don’t really think of mistakes as failures. An error is only an error if you’re measuring against a predetermined outcome, and I’m often deliberately resisting that.

h: Many of your works feel akin to Brechtian theatre, Peter Brook’s theory of The Empty Space, or the Fluxus experiments of George Maciunas. Except here, the actors are objects rather than people. Dialogues, your series of short films, feels highly theatrical. A visual negotiation unfolds, a debate between staging and improvisation, choreography and freedom. How do you go about choreographing movement in your work?

LJ: I’m fascinated by what happens when familiar things are slightly removed from their typical role. I move them around, balance them, lean them against one another and see what kind of alternative relationship emerges. They start to feel less like objects and more like personalities. I know that sounds slightly ridiculous, but I trust that instinct. By the time I make the photograph or film, the performance has already happened. The image is really just the evidence. I know what I’m looking for, but I don’t want to be completely in charge. If an object has a better idea than I do, I’m happy to let it win.

h: Conversely, photography freezes movement entirely. Working with both photography and film, time is everything. Often, your work feels almost meditative, a deliberate slowing down in the midst of a fast-paced world. We talk about time as though it is always running out, while our digital landscape has rendered attention a currency. How would you describe the treatment of time in your work?

LJ: Time is a material like any other, especially in film—you can stretch it, compress it, make it awkward. I’m searching for the moment when looking becomes slightly uncomfortable—when you spend long enough with something that it stops being just an object and starts to acquire a personality, a problem, or even a bit of an attitude. In a world that wants everything instantly understood and consumed, taking time feels like a form of misbehaviour.

h: Your work asks the viewer to slow down and look more carefully. Do you think photography still has the power to change the way we pay attention?

LJ: I hope so. I don’t think photography changes the world so much as it changes the tempo of how we look at it. In a culture of endless scrolling, sustained attention feels almost radical.

If the work can encourage someone to pause long enough to notice the quiet strangeness of an everyday thing, then perhaps they leave looking at the world just a little differently. For me, that’s where photography still has its power.

h: Your practice is almost entirely analogue. Soft Interruptions, for example, was shot on film and hand printed. Could you talk to us about the value of engaging with analogue forms of making? In what ways can physical craft and material media enhance our collective receptiveness to the material world?

LJ: Working analogue means the materials answer back. Film is disobedient, paper has its own temperament, objects refuse to cooperate. I like that. I’d much rather negotiate with a material than tell it what to do.

I’m not interested in analogue because it’s nostalgic or somehow more authentic. I’m interested in it because it’s physical. You can’t swipe past a sheet of photographic paper or convince a piece of wood to become something it isn’t. You have to spend time with it.

h: There is a sense of play in the way you work, but also a deeper question about how we perceive and interpret the world around us. Do you think humour can be a way of revealing something serious or something hidden?

LJ: Absolutely. Humour creates a small opening. It disarms us just enough that we stop looking at things in the way we’re supposed to. Once that certainty slips, other possibilities can emerge. For me, humour and seriousness aren’t opposites. The work often begins with something playful, but that play allows more complicated feelings to surface—fragility, care, instability, loneliness. Sometimes the quickest route towards something profound is through something slightly absurd.

h: We have talked about how your compositions feel carefully controlled, yet they leave space for surprise. How much of your process is about planning, and how much is about allowing something unexpected to happen?

LJ: Planning gives me somewhere to begin; intuition tells me when to let go. I’m interested in creating just enough structure for something unexpected to appear. The most important moments aren’t the ones I invent, but the ones I recognise. When an object suddenly exceeds its function—when it seems to breathe, or hesitate, or lean towards another object—those moments are what I am looking for.

h: If you could invite 3 people (dead or alive) to dinner, knowing they would definitely attend, who would they be?

LJ: Franz Kafka, Hieronymus Bosch and Daniel Johnston—maybe Jesus could swing in for the cheese course?

h: How would you describe the future in 3 words?LJ: Ask the objects.