Dasha Filatova

Unión presents Baby, It's cold outside by Dasha Filatova. Curated Tan Uranga.

Dasha Filatova’s work begins with a fundamental gesture: to walk, to look, to pause and stay. The camera here is not an instrument of control, but of attention. In her everyday paths, through the routines of urban or natural landscapes, the artist encounters objects that seem to have slipped to the margins: fragments of use and material traces that carry the histories of the objects themselves and of the moment. Filatova does not arrange or stage them; she simply recognizes them and lets them speak through photography.Each image condenses a paradox: the insignificant becomes the nucleus of the object’s experience. In the instant it is captured, the object ceases to be an anonymous remnant and transforms into a figure loaded with meaning. It is not embellished or artificially elevated, but rather returned to its place within the field of the visible. What once appeared peripheral to the world suddenly acquires unexpected centrality.In this body of work, photography moves within a constant tension between memory and the present. The objects, stripped of their original function, carry traces of time: marks of use, signs of wear, signals of abandonment. The camera preserves them in that intermediate state in which they no longer serve a practical purpose, yet do not vanish into nothingness. They remain as mute witnesses to a story that never fully concludes, open to the interpretation of those who observe them.The landscape framing these findings is not a mere backdrop, but a territory of resonances. Filatova’s photographs show how each object, in its precariousness and apparent uselessness, becomes an anchor for multiple narratives. The gaze shifts from “what it is” to “what it means,” and in that transition, a poetics emerges, built in silence.The act of photographing here does not reduce itself to registering, but to questioning: what do we see when we look? What stories hide in what we leave behind? The image opens a field of relations where the viewer no longer occupies a passive position, but must complete the experience with their own memory, their personal associations, their affections. In this way, each photograph becomes a shared space, a meeting point between the artist’s gaze and that of the public.Filatova’s work also reminds us that every image is more than surface: it is a device that organizes the sensible, deciding what enters and what remains outside the visible field. Her found objects interrupt the logic of spectacle and shift attention toward the ordinary, toward what was never meant to be seen. The political strength of these photographs lies precisely in redistributing the value of what deserves to be looked at.In ‘Baby, it’s cold outside’, each photographed object is both trace and presence. A trace of a past use, of a life that once touched it; apparition in the present of the image, where it manifests with renewed force. Between these two poles, a poetic and reflective space opens, inviting us to question our own way of inhabiting the world.‘Baby it’s cold outside’ incorporates not only photographs but also a physical display of debris and rubble - a condense of found materials that expands in photographic gesture into the gallery space. This arrangement proposes a new kind of encounter: the visitor moves around discovering remnants of walls, broken fragments, and overlooked shards, as if practicing the act of recognition. Here, the exercise of attention shifts the surface of the photograph to the textures of the space itself, where the fragments open up a field of discovery.This exhibition is not an inventory of objects, but an essay on what we encounter along the way. It is an invitation to exercise attention, to walk differently, to discover that within the most common lies an inexhaustible reservoir of meaning. In the cold of the outside, among indifferent landscapes and forgotten objects, an intimate warmth emerges: the possibility of seeing again, of pausing, of listening to what things still have to say.

–Unión